January 17, 2001

"The finest Christian poet alive today is the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas. Our century has produced some magnificent Christian poetry, but R. S. Thomas has written the most convincing.” So commented poet Mark Jarman in a 1998 interview from the Writer’s Chronicle. We can no longer claim Thomas as a major living poet: he died on September 25 at the age of 87. But we can pay tribute to the extraordinary Christian poetry that he left us.

After 30 years of teaching Christian ethics, I decided that I needed to express myself in something besides words. I wanted a fresh start and a fresh form, something that would go beyond nostalgia, some new symbolic form that would be congruent with my deepest convictions and aspirations. I decided to build a communion table.

The participants at the church retreat had been talking about their families, new grandkids, vacations and pending retirements. The facilitator had asked us to share something personal. I’d shared personal stuff in church groups before. But this time my heart sank and my shoulders slumped. I could feel a shroud of fear and disgrace coming over me. Share something personal? Why? How? What? With bishops in the room?

Imagine for a moment that we meet an angelic visitor who can tell us the future, and we ask whether some person we know will be “saved.” Suppose our visitor says, “No, she will not be saved; instead she is going to get everything she truly wants.” Suppose, on the other hand, that our visitor says, “Yes, she will be saved, though she will never come to know Christ or have communion with the triune God.”

Unbreakable, directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Solomon and Gaenor, directed by Paul Morrison