HOW hard it is, as one wearily enters one’s umpteenth Lent as an adult Christian, to make it real again, to make it new and fresh. And yet Lent itself is precisely about renewal, about rediscovering the deepest roots of one’s faith, finding again the transfigured vision, the hidden hope that made one a Christian in the first place. It is about recovering that glimpse of that Kingdom that Jesus both preached and revealed in his very person.
Since Coleridge rightly claimed that poetry could “awaken the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom” and direct it to “the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not”, we can, perhaps, also use poetry to remove the film of familiarity not only from nature, but from our own spiritual and religious practice. I have certainly found that poetry helps, and Lent is a good time to call the poets to our aid, especially in recovering a sense of the Kingdom that Christ proclaimed and that we seek to inhabit and embody.
The poem that helps me most in this is R. S. Thomas’s brilliant sonnet simply entitled “The Kingdom”: a poem that goes straight to the all-renewing paradoxes of the Kingdom itself, as that Kingdom confronts and evaluates the ways of the world, the worldliness that Lent is here to help us to resist.
The poem starts by frankly admitting the gap that we feel between ourselves and the Kingdom of God as Jesus reveals it: “It’s a long way off but inside it There are quite different things going on. . .”. What kinds of things? Thomas is very specific: “Festivals at which the poor man Is king . . .”.
In God’s Kingdom, Thomas says, even industry is transformed. Whereas here, it is often the arena in which people are injured, and minds are fractured, there, things are different: “. . . industry is for mending The bent bones and the minds fractured By life . . .”.
But how do we get there? Thomas returns to his seemingly bleak opening phrase about the distance between ourselves and the Kingdom, but this time with some good news: “It’s a long way off, but to get There takes no time and admission Is free, if you purge yourself Of desire. . .”.
Ah, that purgation — there’s the rub! Yet isn’t that just what Lent is for? And, lest we mistakenly feel that this is salvation by works, he ends his poem by asserting that all that we need is need itself; that we have only to present ourselves with our need, and with our faith — a faith which he describes, in the last words of the poem, as “green as a leaf”.
That last image is lovely, and so apt, as Lent lives up to its name and lengthens at last into spring. Thomas avails himself happily of the full ambivalence of his final phrase: the world will mock us and call out our faith as credulous, naïve, green in the pejorative sense, but we know better — the Kingdom knows better. We are to be green not with credulity, but with that greening power, that viriditas, as Hildegard of Bingen called it, that makes all new again.