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R. S. Thomas Visits the Cathedral
To Isobel:
wife, mother, teacher, priest;
who believed in it.
Preface
Cathedrals seem to be among the scarce places where church congregations are growing, perhaps because they offer place and worship for people to encounter God without being corralled into ‘parish strategies’, or dragooned into impersonating submarines or orang-utans in ‘action songs’.
Cathedrals magnetise visitors without demanding immediate membership, and inherent commitment. They introduce the Christian past into the secular present, and patiently celebrate the presence of God in a society where s/he is felt often to be as redundant as a coal miner, or as optional as a poet.
Cathedrals intrigue, so people respond. They are generous in many ways, including their encouragement of discerning God through the arts. They take risks, often using the arts experimentally in creative theology, venturing into the radical and the prophetic.
They provide spiritual hospitality to the jaded; a place with the risen Christ to re-imagine the familiar, and dare fresh potential. They share space to renew and redeem lives, in the companionship of the Holy Spirit. They offer sanctuary.
Most of these poems reflect aspects of the life and faith of one cathedral. They were drafted, after a life in journalism, in a new role as the first Poet in Residence of Carlisle Cathedral. Like journalism, they grew from notes, conversations, observations, reflections and experiences; from being there.
Prelude: Leaving St Bridget’s
Came the day and the master said: ‘It’s finished,
it’s good work.’ We all stepped back to look
up for once, as the priest was always asking.
What did he see? Not the callous under squared stone
lifted, set day after day. Not grey and grit
of mortar, not scaffold and winded hoist swaying
in a cross-raising, but high blues and whites
of Our Lady, and an angels’ sky. We raised our eyes.
The master said: ‘Time to be packing the carts, then
off to the next one.’ First he let us wander
to see the whole thing, feel the others’ work:
that angle in the arrowed door, that soar
of arch over altar, ‘stone rainbow span’
as the priest described it; each frame of light
where we set eternity square. Each footstep
took us further away. One pause, to look back
at the scale of it, ship above the mill of huts,
then a bend in the lane. A stand of thinning ash
made a picket between us and our past. Four days
tramping churned roads through buffet and drench.
A Roman line to start, then a gesture of sea,
and gradually, when the sky stood back a bit,
a level of hills pegged true, like the new walls
we’d raise when we arrived, a dream in stone
built in St Mary’s name. New Latin word,
and world: ‘cathedra’.
Foreign Correspondent
You touch down, wondering about language,
your need for a translator, your contacts book
thin on the ground. You face deadlines to update
news running for centuries, to find a new
line beyond headlines of decline, or saviour.
You are set between last flight, next empty morning,
sit at the back, watch, attempt the low profile
of a holy visitor or resident angel, caught
between being yourself, and representing who sent you.
So many potential angles: those identities
carved for a screen, those poets poised by the door
for a quick exit, Jacobite prisoners, that idea of collecting
stars
