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Grace to find us out      

Gillian Baker

 Read: The Absence by R S Thomas

 This poem by the 20th century poet/priest R S Thomas, while not ostensibly about Advent, explores the condition of anxiously waiting and willing for God to come. ‘Waiting for the arrival of one who has not yet come’ - a situation Christians celebrate every year at Advent.

 The poet senses that He is close by, but that, in spite of his intense longing for him to come, he is just beyond reach; his frustrated longing leaves him without hope.  This is a trope which Thomas shares with the metaphysical poet priests of the 17th century.  Both George Herbert and John Donne explore this theme dazzlingly in their works.

 Daringly, Thomas shifts the focus of his attention through a 2000 year span; comparing the Hebrews calling up the Messiah before the birth of Christ to his own personal plight – long after the birth of Christ - grappling to seek God in a sceptical scientific age.

 Dismayed by this failure of both ancient ritual and intellectual and scientific approaches to God, he makes a leap of faith in the final stanza to trust that

 ‘the emptiness without him of my whole being’ will be ‘a vacuum God may not abhor’. 

 The word abhor is familiar from the Christmas carol O come all ye faithful: ‘Lo he abhors not the virgin’s womb’ and directs us tentatively to the great gift of the Christ Child at Christmas.

 This is not a poem for the fainthearted. Searching, and often not finding, God is a long and difficult journey which may not be illuminated by history or by the seeming rationality of our modern age. Faith is required to abandon these things and trust in God’s grace to find us out.