Faith is in the turning

Recently I discovered the Anglo-Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, who was an Anglican priest at rural parishes throughout his life and searched for God in silence. What comforts and urges me on about his spirituality is that he understands the point is obedience to the choice of acting in faith. Reaping a benefit from that choice is not what it's about; the act of faithing is what matters.

I love these lines from his poem "A Bright Field:" "Life is not hurrying / on to a receding future, nor hankering after / an imagined past. It is the turning / aside like Moses to the miracle / of the lit bush, to a brightness / that seemed as transitory as your youth / once, but is the eternity that awaits you."

Writer Jeffrey Bilbro puts it like this in his essay "Turn Aside: The Poetic Vision of R. S. Thomas:" "Yet Thomas insists that life is found when we, like Moses, turn aside from our habitual strivings, take off our shoes and stand before a miracle that lies outside our expectations. ... Though Thomas may not see God 'when I turn,' he finds him 'in the turning' itself; the practice of Christian faith entails precisely this turning aside to 'the eternity that awaits.'"

In other words, it is in the act of the turning where we find God. Faith, as Rev. Edie Bird says, is a verb.

This faith is what it takes to claim our lives and live them. In another of his poems, "Lore," Thomas writes, "Live large, man, and dream small." It is the opposite of what we have so often been instructed to do; perhaps therein lies our salvation. The mystic's way of living: not wishing for something else that does not or does not yet exist but rather pressing into what is before us that is real.

So let us, then, receive fully our reality. The parts we love to accept and the parts we would like to push aside as we daydream them different. Let us take into ourselves every last piece of each thing we have been given, believing nothing is wasted or for naught when we offer all back to God. As Romans 8:28 tells us, God works for our good in all things. So let's offer all things to him.

And when we feel that what we have to offer is a bad gift? We can know how God feels about us by thinking about the child who holds out to us wayward presents he or she finds value in or gives over to us the parts of something she or he doesn't want anymore and isn't sure what else to do with but is confident in our ability to do with it what needs to be done. In the same way we receive the gift or take the trash from the child, God's love for us allows him to delight in even these less-than-stellar gifts we hold out to him. Let's make sacrifices of praise and praises of sacrifice.

The Surrender Novena has us pray this prayer: "I surrender myself completely to you, O Lord. Take care of everything!" Let us make this prayer our own and trust our Lord with all the parts of this means of our salvation we call life.