Land meets Sea meets Sky: "Prayers Like Gravel"

The second post in this short series combines some photos from my summer travels with the words to the poem "Folk Tale" by R. S. Thomas

"Folk Tale"



Prayers like gravel


flung at the sky's
window,


hoping to attract
the loved one's
attention.


But without
visible plaits to let
down for the believer
to climb up,


to what purpose open
that far casement?



I would
have refrained long since
but that peering once
through my locked fingers


I thought that I detected
the movement of a curtain.

As I walk along a shingle beach, the stones crunching under my feet, I find myself looking at the gravel, slowly being eroded to sand. I think to myself:

"in the face of attrition, of being slowly worn down by time we must tread carefully and walk lightly."

So, I sit down on the beach. Amongst the gravel I gaze up to the vast load of sky. Looking toward the sun I squint and wink in response to the dazzling light, shadowing my eyes with my hand.

How can I mediate the physical and the etheral?

Picking up a handful of gravel and showering it upward, petitioning the air with a squall of small stones may seem a futile gesture. But it is no more futile than many of our loves, dreams, hopes and desires.

It is the feeling that perhaps I do occasionally detect the "movement of a curtain" that still keeps me waiting expectantly. Like a fig tree that is yet to bear fruit I think I'd better persevere a little while longer ...

An Old Water Pump

On Sunday afternoon we went to Powis Castle to walk around the gardens. Here’s a photograph of an old water pump, and some quotes from Robert Barclay that I included in a previous post, but I felt I just had to repeat them:

“As it prevails in every individual, it becomes like a flood of refreshment and extends over the whole meeting”

“The faithful person … is like a pump which brings up water by the bucketful when it has been primed with a cup or two. The useless wandering of the imagination is discontinued and the life becomes raised in all. Those who have been helped are aware that such a person has ministered life to them without words.”

“Each one partakes not only of the particular strength and refreshment which comes from the good in themselves, but shares with that of the whole body. Being a living member of the whole body, there is joint fellowship and communion with all.”

from Barclay's Apology in Modern English

Land meets Sea meets Sky: "Sea-watching"

Watching the Sea

During my time in Cornwall I spent a lot of time just watching the sea. Often my gaze was drawn away from the aesthetic anonymity of the vast expanse of ocean stretching to the horizon. I came to focus upon a small patch of water where waves were breaking upon rocks accompanied by the roaring of sea and the churning of pebbles and sand. Here, the once hidden depths and turbulent eddies below the surface were hauled up, broken and given a mantra-like elemental expression. These were the marginal spaces, the liminal landscapes and the ‘thin’ places where the sea reaches out its hand to meet the land.

Watching the sea became compulsive. For me, this had the effect of ‘self-forgetting’, of emptying-out of my own thoughts and preoccupations. As such, this may be considered to be a form of prayer, as I freely and un-selfconciously came to devote my attention to something outside of myself.

R. S. Thomas

The poetry of the Welsh priest R. S. Thomas is a continual source of inspiration. His religious poetry was a major factor that sparked my interest in exploring spirituality. For me, his poetry so eloquently encapsulates the struggle of apprehending and coming to terms with the reticence of a physically absent God. What makes RST’s work so cathartic is the way he uses words to try and salvage some meaning from the brink of religious despondency. In so doing, he is saying – it’s alright to be uncertain, it’s ok not-knowing, to see the existential void that points to emptiness as a process we have to engage with in the hope that there will be moments when we will catch a sparkling glimmer of hope for the future.

"Sea-watching"

One of my favourite poems, which washes around in my head all the time, is “Sea-watching” from the 1975 collection "Laboratories of the Spirit". So, I’d like to share the words of Sea-Watching with you, accompanied by some pictures I took of the sea when I was in Cornwall.

Grey waters, vast
as an area of prayer
that one enters.


Daily,
over a period of years
I have let the eye rest on them.

Was I waiting for something?

Nothing
but that continuous waving
that is without meaning
occurred.

Ah, but a rare bird is
rare. It is when one is not looking,
at times one is not there
that it comes.


You must wear your eyes out,
as others their knees

I became the hermit
of the rocks, habited with the wind and the mist.

There were days,

so beautiful the emptiness it might have filled,

its absence
was as its presence; not to be told
any more, so single my mind
after its long fast,

my watching from praying.

Reflection

I love the idea of entering “an area of prayer” – it seems Thomas engaged in the calling to pray, but was disheartened by not feeling a form of reciprocation. Just as the vast expanse of sea – it offered up what seemed an empty, meaningless vacuum that prayer tried to inhabit and populate. Like being presented with a blank canvas – how do we respond to it? It is the same with Quaker silence.

Is the Quaker silence that we gather in just a symbolic absence of noise - a meaningless void, which articulates a reclusive indifference, something to retreat behind? At times the silence can be deafening, when I have longed for it’s ambivalence to be broken. At other times, I have longed for quietness – to dwell just for a little while in a still, golden and gathered silence, where we freely come together in fellowship, to wait upon God in expectancy, in spirit and in truth, where words would be clumsy, inadequate and unable to articulate the deep and inward sense of God’s presence. As RST notes - with sea-watching you wear out your eyes just as religious hermits wore out their knees in prayer. So, perhaps in the attentive listening of Quaker stillness we are slowly wearing out our ears. RST cautions us not to try too hard because it is when we are at our most un-self-conscious that we may come to retrospectively attribute our experiences to being a form of spiritual communion. And we have to wait patiently to foster these moments, when we come closest to the feeling of having a vacuum filled, when we experience the overflowing of God’s inexhaustible and unconditional love.

Returning from Port

I return from a family holiday to Port Isaac in Cornwall. I really needed this break - I had a great time and it was wonderful to just get away from it all and spend some time together. We didn’t do anything adventurous – being blessed with really great weather we were perfectly content to spend our time visiting places on the coast and looking around old churches.

View of Port Isaac from where we were staying

This provided more than enough refreshment. We had plenty of quiet time. For me this involved a lot of personal reflection and introspection - dwelling in silence and being immersed in stillness. In the space and time offered to me for reflexivity I started to come to a tentative perspective on things. After 2 years of attending Quaker Meetings I am still slowly working through my spiritual struggles. I realise that if I am to be serious about embodying, practising and meaningfully articulating my “religion/ faith/ belief” I need to reflect upon my sources of spiritual inspiration - where I’ve come from, how far I’ve come and in what directions I’d like to go in the future. Its quite exciting standing at this crossroads! I intend to do a couple of posts on my initial Cornish reflections under the umbrella title: "Land meets Sea meets Sky" ...

The ruins of Tintagel Castle

Musical Excursions

Holidays are often made memorable by great music, and my recent Cornish excursions were made that much better by the following musical accompaniment:

Music of Mali

This CD was being played in this great pub in Port Isaac Harbour which sold a smashing pint of Sharp’s Mote Ale. The gift shop next door sold the CDs on the amazing Putumayo World Music label, so we bought a copy. One Mali band I’m really in to is the Touareg band Tinariwen – their 'Amassakoul' album is full of inspiring, funky and groovy hand-clapping music. One of their tracks was on this compilation CD, and all the other featured artists has really opened my eyes to the wonderful eclectic music coming from this African country.

Fisherman’s Friends - Suck 'em and Sea

On our first evening on holiday we walked into Port Isaac. We stumbled upon a Friday night session on the Harbour by the Port Isaac Sea Shanty Singers – “The Fisherman’s Friends”! And we bought their CD too – called “Suck ‘em and sea”!

Yeah! - “…Heave away! Haul Away!...” for rousing and rip roaring sea shanties

George Harrison - Brainwashed

My brother’s current musical favourite – 'Brainwashed' by the late great George Harrison. The music certainly has great evocative lilts of The Traveling Wilburys and Crosby, Stills and Nash.

And the stand out lyric? Well, it’s just got to be:

“…If you don’t know where you’re going –
any road will take you there…”

Being Open To New Light

Way-Hey!: I got a great big poster with the latest issue of Quaker News!

It says:

"Be open to new light,
wherever it might come from."

So, I've put it up in my bedroom!

And it's a BIG poster! Click to enlarge!

As it happens, I have been opening myself to, and reflecting upon, new sources of inspiration recently.

I look forward to sharing these thoughts with Friends in the coming posts ...