Not the Empty Tomb by R.S. Thomas

Today, I offer you poetry from a giant of 20th Century writing—the Welsh poet-priest, R S Thomas.

What to choose?

I love Thomas, because his poems crackle with intelligence and rarely go where I expect them to. They always leave me with open questions, and from this, I infer that this might also have been true of Thomas’ faith. In some senses, his poems do not fully satisfy, because they leave me without an easy conclusion.

I say this because in many ways this is my experience at this point of my life when faced with the cross. After all the deconstruction of the scaffold of religion, after starting the see the theory of substitutionary atonement as just that – a theory, and a flawed theory at that – what do I do with the cross?

In this Holy Week journey towards a new encounter with the meaning of the cross, what do we do with the cross? How might we encounter new meaning? How do we pick it up and carry it for ourselves?

I can’t answer these questions for you or myself, except through the open questions of poetry.

“Not the Empty Tomb,” by R S Thomas

Not the empty tomb
but the uninhabited
cross. Look long enough
and you will see the arms
put on leaves. Not a crown
of thorns, but a crown of flowers
haloing it, with a bird singing
as though perched on paradise’s threshold.

We have over-furnished
our faith. Our churches
are as limousines in the procession
towards heaven. But the verities
remain: a de-nuclearized
cross, uncontaminated
by our coinage; the chalice’s
ichor; and one crumb of bread
on the tongue for the bird-like
intelligence to be made tame by

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