"Closer Than All of Them the God Listened"

Fritz Kreisler

I have mentioned before (and will reference again on Easter Sunday) that I have been reading through the works of the Welsh poet and Anglican priest R.S. Thomas.  He is considered by some to be one of the most influential poets of the last century.  I would not describe his work as brimming with sunshine.  His thinking reflects the darkness of an era of world war, Holocaust, genocide, nuclear proliferation, social upheaval, the failure of industry, the triumph of technology, unabashed faith in science, and everything else you might consider to be part and parcel of the 20^th century western world.  You might expect an ordained poet to articulate exactly how God can be found in all of this, but this is precisely where Thomas struggles.  For him, God is most often the God of silence and absence. 

There is perhaps no better articulation of his thinking than a poem titled “In Church.”  In it, Thomas describes his search for God as he sits in the quiet of a church on a Sunday afternoon after everyone has gone home from the services earlier in the day.  In my experience, worship spaces take on a very different feel and personality Sunday afternoon through Saturday night.  They are not at all the same lively, dynamic place we experience them to be on Sunday mornings.  You can feel the quiet and taste the emptiness.  Listen to Thomas’ poem:

Often I try
To analyse the quality
Of its silences.  Is this where God hides
From my searching?  I have stopped to listen,
After the few people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil.  It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate.  Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour.  The bats resume
Their business.  The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases.  There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

Many people, it seems to me, experience God as being rather, well chatty – always talking, always teaching, always close at hand to lend aid, cheer, and sappy inspiration.  That God might be anything but never seems to enter their mind.  Yet this was Thomas’ experience.  Often is it mine.  And I suspect it may be yours as well. 

Earlier this week I was reading through the bible’s story of Abraham.  According to the text, the Lord spoke to him when he was eighty-four years old, promising that he and Sarah would have a son.  The Lord appeared to Abraham again when he was ninety-nine and reissued the promise.  Laying aside the question of procreation at such an old age, think about what the story suggests – that Abraham went fifteen years in between hearing from God.  That is a long silence.  That is a lengthy, and for some I suspect, an alarming absence.

Even though we fill this moment with the words of scripture and liturgy and preaching, more than any other time of the year this hour in this space feels like a time of profound silence.  You will not encounter a chit-chatty God here.  The Passion reading lays out a pervasive silence that no words can change.  Like the disciples at the foot of the Cross, we simply watch and wait.  Regardless of the words we recite and say, no words really are necessary.  No words we utter can mask the fact that God says nothing in the story we just heard.  I for one am fine with this.  In fact, God’s silence is what draws me to this day. 

R.S. Thomas found a way to be comfortable with it by coming to understand that silence and absence are not at all the same thing.  He articulated this through a poem titled “The Musician” which is especially poignant today.  The poem begins with Thomas attending a performance by the master violinist Fritz Kreisler and then moves to the Cross:

A memory of Kreisler once:
At some recital in this same city,
The seats all taken, I found myself pushed
On to the stage with a few others,
So near that I could see the toil
Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth
Fluttering under the fine skin,
And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.

I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,
Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,
As we sat there or warmly applauded
This player who so beautifully suffered
For each of us upon his instrument.

So it must have been on Calvary
In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:
The men standing by and that one figure,
The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,
Making such music as lives still.
And no one daring to interrupt
Because it was himself that he played
And closer than all of them the God listened.

God as listener.  God as focused observer.  God as mesmerized by the beautiful music one makes of one’s life.  God as attentive to the sorrowful sound of every plaintive cry.  God as one who does not say something snappy or syrupy or sentimental and cheap.  God as one who will not offer a technical explanation of atonement theory or some other theology so as to sweep up the moment as part of some grand scheme we need to embrace in an act of what some mistakenly call ‘faith’. 

“Closer than all of them the God listened.” 

Every performer knows the value of an audience.  As a preacher, I know the profound difference between reading my sermon aloud in preparation for a service and actually preaching it in a setting such as this one.  Even though you do not say a word as you listen, your listening makes all the difference.  It means that my words matter.  They are not merely reverberating off the walls.  Your listening gives shape and form to what I say and it holds the promise of an impact.  While I prefer compliments to criticism, it is your listening that I crave.  And even though you are silent I sense your participation in this moment.  You are silent, but you are not absent.

This, I think, is what R.S. Thomas came to understand and he came to understand it in the silence he experienced on this day at this moment.  He came to sense that God was most present in the depths of the deepest silence imaginable.  I suspect some people, perhaps many, are not comfortable with a God who listens, but says little or nothing.  I, for one, find it refreshing, moving, and greatly appealing.  There are times when words are not appropriate and there are times when words are not possible.  It can be moments of great joy or tremendous sorrow.  It can even be true of moments so ordinary that their enormous value often escapes us.  What these moments require is not narration, but attention; listening, not description.

Today God listens to the Son’s beautiful music that makes music still.  Today God is silent.  God will not speak tomorrow either.  But on the third day the God who listens will act.  From today’s silence something new and extraordinary will emerge.  For people of faith, the Listening God is enough.  The immediate divine word giving way to a constant verbal barrage does not seem authentic.  I like when God is silent because often the silence is what needs to be said.  Resurrection will happen.  New life will come.  Sowing with tears will give way to reaping with songs of joy.  Holding to this is what faith is all about.  Being comfortable in the absence of words in the space of the suffering moment is the surest sign that one’s faith is grounded in that which is solid, in that which is God. 

Will you give me the gift of sitting with me for a few moments in silence, allowing God to listen closely to the music the Son has played?