Prayer remains very difficult. This question of the intersection of human awareness and reality continues to bother me. It seems that lately I am trapped within myself. There is no beyond, or other, or transcendence. Which makes it very difficult when all I want is to let self go, get rid of it (if that is not too much of an oxymoron). Such an attitude is possible when one is, however dimly, aware of transcendence, aware of a sense of presence, of the Other. It becomes impossible, perverse even, when the only reality is that which is mediated by the self. Anything else is a memory, an academic conjecture, something to be believed. Suddenly I understand what blind faith is. There is no support, not emotional, not intellectual, not experiential. There is only the will, a will that flickers and gutters like the stub of candle, feeble in the face of adversity and the centripetal effect of suffering, stronger when wellbeing supports it. This is darkness, of what variety I don’t know.
I came across this poem by R. S. Thomas. I am always surprised when I come across a reading which seems utterly appropriate at the time and which opens out and widens the horizon from the constricted view of the self.
I have seen it standing up grey,
Gaunt, as though no sunlight
Could ever thaw out the music
Of the great bell, terrible
In its own way, for religion
is like that. There are times
When a black frost is upon
One’s whole being, and the heart
In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb.
But who is to know? Always,
Even in winter, in the cold
Of a stone church, on his knees
Someone is praying, whose prayers fall
Steadily, through the hard spell
Of weather that is between God
And himself. Perhaps they are warm rain
That brings the sun and afterwards flowers
On the raw graves and the throbbing of bells.