Life-Metaphors: Pilgrimage

Over the last few years, R. S. Thomas has become one of my favorite poets. He was an Anglican pastor who was rooted in the land and people of Wales. In his deep love for Wales, he served a number of rural parishes and preached regularly in the Welsh language.

Consistent with his love of Wales, Thomas' poetry is earthy and real. He was not orthodox or light-hearted, but wrote verse that could be dark. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, called Thomas a "great articulator of uneasy faith."

I find his verse to be honest. He had the courage to look at the interior of things without flinching, including his own interior. In fact, he was fiercely interior. He didn't pretend about life. And he found in common life-experiences the stuff of holiness.

So for several days I've spent time with a Thomas poem that uses the metaphor of pilgrimage to a holy site -- is it Iona? or an ancient Welsh site? -- for the interior journey deeper into God. I find a couple of the images especially striking . . . his depiction of God as a "fast God" first caught my attention . . . and then the last seven lines of the poem ring true to me.

Here is the poem, simply called, "Pilgrimages."

Pilgrimages
R. S. Thomas

There is an island there is no going
to but in a small boat the way
the saints went, travelling the gallery
of the frightened faces of
the long-drowned, munching the gravel
of its beaches. So I have gone
up the salt lane to the building
with the stone altar and the candles
gone out, and kneeled and lifted
my eyes to the furious gargoyle
of the owl that is like a god
gone small and resentful. There
is no body in the stained window
of the sky now. Am I too late?
Were they too late also, those
first pilgrims? He is such a fast
God, always before us and
leaving as we arrive.

There are those here
not given to prayer, whose office
is the blank sea that they say daily.
What they listen to is not
hymns but the slow chemistry of the soil
that turns saints’ bones to dust,
dust to an irritant of the nostril.

There is no time on this island.
The swinging pendulum of the tide
has no clock; the events
are dateless. These people are not
late or soon; they are just
here with only the one question
to ask, which life answers
by being in them. It is I
who ask. Was the pilgrimage
I made to come to my own
self, to learn that in times
like these and for one like me
God will never be plain and
out there, but dark rather and
inexplicable, as though he were in here?

[R.S. Thomas, Later Poems: 1972 – 1982 (London: Macmillan, 1983), 125 – 26.]