As If Life Were A Good Thing
A Lamb Gamboling
I’ve been reading lately the amazing poet R. S. Thomas. I’ve been taking him slowly, almost devotionally—a poem a day is about all I can digest at one time. These poems require careful attention, lingering reflection. This poetry is rich, often surprising, sometimes impenetrable, sometimes as harsh and spare as the Welsh landscape where he lived.
Thomas was an Anglican priest, faithfully pastoring various rural villages in Wales for many years. He knew well the rugged land. He knew as well the rough-edged farmers who eked out a living from the barren hillsides. He knew what it means not to expect too much of life, to ponder whether love can even exist, to ponder when God is present, but as well, when God is distant or absent.
Why am I reading this poet who seems so distant from the concerns of my everyday life? Well, for one thing, his language is exquisite, daring, darting, playful, often daunting. I like language like that. I’m attracted to Thomas because in the midst of all the harshness, often he catches a glimpse of God’s presence shining out from the ordinary. I love his poetry because I know it is through words that he is sometimes rescued from life’s uncertainties.
Mostly, I am attracted to this poet because we too are living through harsh times. As we all know these days, things can feel hopeless, fractured, disordered, dysfunctional. We are told so often, Thomas contends, that we live in a world of progress, and yet, beneath the surface, we detect “the murmuring of the starved heart and the uneasy spirit?”
Thomas begins one of his poems, “Mischief,” with these lines:
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I have lived with nothingness
so long it has lost its meaning.
I have said “yes” to the universe
so many times its echoes
have returned increasingly as “no.”
I have developed my negatives
of the divine and preserved their technicolour
in a make-believe album.’
I remember as a young student, my late teens, early college years, how stunned I was on first reading Camus’s assertion, out of the mouth of Meursault, one of his central characters, looking out at the stars on a beautiful night, before his execution, only to encounter the “benign indifference of the universe.” I remember the old waiter in Hemingway who was afraid to go home from the well-lighted bar because he was afraid of “a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too.”
Thomas knows the world where indifference and nothingness preside, where God, we are told, has withdrawn, only to be preserved in a “make-believe album.” But this new worldview, just emerging in those days of my early college years, was profoundly jolting to me, utterly new. It was decidedly not the biblical worldview by which I was shaped. Looking back, this new worldview, from Camus and the Hemingway and so many others, was precisely the moment when the cultural templates began their massive shift. We imagined we had put God to bed, out-of-sight, out-of- mind, no longer needed, only to be nostalgically recovered in an old dusty album. We began to observe the consequences.
Thomas knows all of this, but watch what happens when his poem breathtakingly pivots:
But against
all this I have seen the lamb
gamboling for a moment, as though
life were a good thing.
Beyond the supposed indifference of the universe; beyond a nothingness that is terrifying to an old man who can’t turn out the lights; beyond the God who is wrapped in an album—have we really come to questioning whether life can ever be a good thing? Isn’t this an indictment on the new worldview I was absorbing as a young college student, the view that permeates our world today, seeping into our daily lives often without our awareness?
Watch for that lamb gamboling out across the pastures. It’s springtime. There’s new life to celebrate. Life is actually a good thing! Don’t you see it too? Come join me in my watching.
This is why I read R. S. Thomas: He notices “the lamb / gamboling for a moment.” He can declare, without naïveté, that life is a good thing. He sees that noticing the lamb can make all the difference in our lives and in the world. Yes, Thomas tells me about the tough stuff, but then he reminds me to watch for the lamb gamboling, as if life were a good thing.