To One Kneeling Down No Word Came

December 27, 2022 | Jonathan Chan

image description: man harvesting crop in a wet field

For the last four years, I have been haunted by the voice of R. S. Thomas. An Anglican priest who tended to a parish in Wales, Thomas was also a poet. His poems have stood as lodestones in the corners of my mind each time I have prayed, or sat down to write a poem of my own. Thomas’ poems are characteristically spare, suspicious of certainty, hostile to mechanisation, and filled with the ache of doubt. One would consider this curious considering Thomas’ vocation: as a priest, he had to model piety to a congregation of farmers and labourers. The notion of ‘toil’ was never far from their minds. And to Thomas, for whom romanticized visions of a pastoral life were broken down by the desolation and uncouthness that awaited him in the Welsh countryside, like the work of his congregants, prayer too turned into a kind of toil. 

Prayer, that old paradox, that ancient discipline. 

Thomas’ life was beset by a number of alienations. Chief of which was a radical alienation from God. In his poem ‘The Other’, Thomas describes God as ‘that other being who is awake, too, / letting our prayers break on him’. And yet, Thomas also found himself alienated from a kind of ethnic or cultural identity. Thomas was Welsh. He was born, raised, and educated in Wales. He railed against the materialism of the English, whom he saw as the colonisers of his homeland, culpable for the land acquisition and industrialisation that alienated so many like him. However, he only came to learn the Welsh language at the age of 30. Educated in English and Latin for most of his life, his learning of Welsh came too late for him to ever hope to write poetry in it. It seemed that he would continue in this bind, on one hand, haunted by the pastoral idealization of Wales in the English imagination, on the other, only being able to rail against it through the language of the forces he detested. 

My first encounter with Thomas came at a time when I found it hard to pray. His poems emerged at a meeting with fellow English literature students at my undergraduate Christian fellowship, each grappling with the creeping sense of an absent God. “It’s this feeling of a person having just left the room,” a friend would say. The sensation of reaching for someone who had just departed, or who had deliberately made themselves hard to find. It haunted us. Where was God in the midst of an onslaught of essays, or when the act of reading had been made barren through inundation? Where was He amidst the great many contradictions that defined the city we lived in? Where was God when the beginning of each day was marked by the exhaustion of eyes slowly peeling open? Where was God when the endless tasks of each day turned to cobwebbed clutter in the mind? To ask and to pray, to ask and to pray. To force the words out verbally, and not to rely on the anxious mental whirlwind that fogged each attempt to pray.  

Thomas would come to be lifted up as a kindred figure in our gatherings, one in whom our doubts found a kind of validation. If a priest was ensnared by the sensation that God was absent, then what more could be said of university students facing the same barrenness? If a priest found it hard to pray, what more could be said for the ordinary believer? The old adage is that prayer is a form of dialogue with God, one that demands listening as much as it does speaking. It functions not just as a gloss of daily needs and desires that demand to be met, nor as a panacea for the ills of the world’s cruelties. Fundamentally, it works as a kind of internal reordering, one that situates the soul in its proper place. “Our Father, in Heaven,” so Christ begins his famous prayer, “hallowed be thy name.” It foregrounds the presence and glory of God, one so transcendent and ineffable as to approximate a kind of otherness. And it is in approaching this grand otherness, so alien to the imperfections of mortal flesh, that the toil of prayer arises. 

Persistence and solitude are markers of the practice of prayer in the Christian tradition, one that demands time and energy.“Pray until you can pray,” quipped the preacher Charles Spurgeon. “Prayer is the supreme instance of the hidden character of the Christian life,” remarked priest Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is no wonder that it is termed a spiritual “discipline”. Compare this to Thomas’ poem ‘In a Country Church’:

To one kneeling down no word came,

Only the wind’ s song, saddening the lips

Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;

Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,

Bats not angels, in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long

And saw love in a dark crown

Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree

Golden with fruit of a man’s body.

That’s the entire poem. It is a poem about prayer that begins with negation. The idea of prayer as dialogue immediately breaks down: ‘To one kneeling down no word came.’ Thomas’ approximation of the act of prayer in his poem plays out more like John Cage’s composition ‘4’33”’, where the score instructs musicians to lay down their instruments for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Audiences sit in silence and listen to the sounds of their theatre – coughing, fidgeting, rustling. So too with Thomas – only the ‘wind’s song’, the ‘dry whisper of unseen wings’, ‘Bats’ on the roof in place of ethereal ‘angels’. Herein, the trace of an absent God is keenly felt. However implicit, one may think of the charge that prayer is a delusion, if to Thomas the waiting of prayer is its own kind of absurdity. 

It is at this moment that Thomas breaks his stanza into two, with the rhetorical question revealing a slight indignation. Does ‘silence’ truly balk at the earnest person who seeks to pray? Thomas emphasises the stretching of time, the figure kneeling ‘long’, taking up the notion that patience and persistence allow mental distraction to fall away. For Thomas, prayer brings neither clarity nor an unambiguous ‘word’, nor even a picture of Christ himself. Just a sign of him: ‘love in a dark crown / Of thorns blazing’. Beyond, a ‘winter tree’, ‘Golden with fruit of a man’s body’. These are images from the scene of the Crucifixion – the crown of thorns, the cross or tree on which God bled. Yet, Thomas swaps the cross for its innocuous counterpart, a gleaming tree that inheres in the life given by a ‘man’s body’. The poem cannot resist to the hint of Christ. A utilitarian calculus would shrug that the toil of prayer should yield mere sensations – images that flicker across a mind. To a believer, however, the force of these images is everything. As Thomas writes in his poem ‘The Bright Field’ 

But that was the 

pearl of great price, the one field that had 

treasure in it. I realise now 

that I must give all that I have to 

possess it. 

Given the multiple kinds of alienation Thomas experienced – from language, from ethnicity, from God – one feels a sense of a person who never stands on stable ground. In other poems, the voice of Thomas is halting, haunted by the provisionality of its position, disillusioned with the trappings and occasional mundanity of religion. Consider his treatment of the Pietà, the tableau of a slain Christ held in his mother’s arms:

Always the same hills 

Crowd the horizon, 

Remote witnesses 

Of the still scene. 

And in the foreground 

The tall Cross, 

Sombre, untenanted, 

Aches for the Body 

That is back in the cradle 

Of a maid’s arms.

This is no poem of jubilation, nor of grief and melancholy. It is emotionally distant, spectatorial almost. Gazing upon the Welsh landscape, Thomas may have thought of the hills overseeing Jerusalem at Golgotha. Thomas does not rest on the joy that followed two days after the Resurrection, but rather seems to humanize the site of cruelty where Christ suffered. The Cross is ‘Sombre’ and ‘Aches for the Body’ of Christ. Is this a display of a yearning for violence? Does something within this poem insist on the prolonging of suffering? Somehow, the poem resolves on the relief of Christ in His mother’s arms, if only to insist that the elongation of pain would be too much. To Thomas, prayer is yoked to the images of Christian teaching, even if they are examined to the point where they become sated and bereft of meaning. ‘No word’ comes from God, only the shuddering force of the image. God is wholly ‘other’ to sinful humanity, accessible only through a glimpse of such images, and through the awareness that human pleas break upon His body like waves. 

Somehow, however, Thomas cannot escape the allure of the epiphanic, the sudden revelations of divine presence. In an instant of profound realization, ‘otherness’ can become comprehensible, enough to slake a spiritual thirst. God’s absence cultivates a desire of God’s presence; we know how much we desire God only at the point when we realise how far He is. In an instant, the toil of prayer makes sense. An awareness of God is not a reward for toil; He becomes present in the midst of it. The distance between Him and humanity is momentarily bridged. This idea of God as comprehensible through absence is part of a lineage known as apophatic theology, itself traced to medieval mystics such as the author of ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ and St. John of the Cross. One could even see it extend beyond, present in the modern ascetics of Ethiopia who hide in forests to pray, present in the poetry of Robert Hayden, Carol Ann Duffy, Christian Wiman, and David Wong Hsien Ming. Yet, it is insufficient as a foundation of faith. Thomas recognises this, as is evident in his poem ‘The Moor’:

It was like a church to me.

I entered it on soft foot,

Breath held like a cap in the hand.

It was quiet.

What God was there made himself felt,

Not listened to, in clean colours

That brought a moistening of the eye,

In movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness

Of the heart’s passions—that was praise

Enough; and the mind’s cession

Of its kingdom. I walked on,

Simple and poor, while the air crumbled

And broke on me generously as bread.

I have been drawn back to this poem again and again. The sense of release that comes through the poem is palpable. It makes no effort to disguise itself as a prayer, at least not in the sense of sitting in solitude before God, interceding for others and oneself. It does not recall the toil of prayer that Christ himself went through, pressured to the point of sweating droplets of blood while praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. In a moment of natural theology, God makes ‘himself felt, / Not listened to.’ Thomas is insistent that ‘There were no prayers said.’ The overwhelming sense of ‘stillness / Of the heart’s passions’ is shown to be sufficient. ‘The mind’s cession / Of its kingdom’ is enough. It is an act of a mental, psychological, emotional surrender. To the believer, Thomas offers a language expansive enough for faith and doubt. 

To see the end of toil and striving, the end of mental tussle and striving in solitude, to come to a place of such profound assurance that the mind begins to cede ‘its kingdom’ to a power eminently more capable of caring for it. To press into divine otherness when those in need demand it, to emerge from prayer ready to move to action. To find the sudden, epiphanic moment where God makes himself known, where long, solitary nights face the prying of daybreak. To have such assurance that momentarily, the distance from God has been closed. To know that such desolation will come again. And to await the day where we can see the end of pain and pity, sorrow and suffering, to hear Christ proclaim, “It is finished!’ These are some of the visions I have glimpsed through the poems of R. S. Thomas. For that and for him, I will always be grateful.