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Rowan Williams: a rare churchman poet |
Rowan Williams - Going with the flow along the river of faith
ONCE upon a time churchmen/poets were two a penny – well, two a pound.
Think George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Donne, Thomas Traherne. They’re rarer now, at least in Britain, and even rarer, anywhere, among the top brass.
The last Pope wrote plays, but it’s a very long time since an Archbishop of Canterbury was a published poet. Mind you, Rowan Williams is Welsh, where the bards come from, not to mention one of the greatest British poets of the past 100 years, the awkward and craggy Rev RS Thomas.
Williams is a man steeped in the Welsh oral and written traditions who recently confided in a radio interview that he wrote poetry, not to escape from gay bishops and evangelical hard-liners, but because it was an essential activity: something for which affairs of Church and State might sometimes have to be put aside.
Headwaters is his third collection of poetry and follows the river of faith into some hard places: Death Row in a Ugandan prison, or a forest where the 19th century Russian Saint, Serafim of Sarov, spent long periods of isolation. Places of loneliness, danger and darkness. A darkness though that doesn’t put out the light.
Looking into the condemned cells of that Ugandan prison, where some men have been for 23 years, and seeing the absurd Christmas lights that drape the yard, Williams writes:
…You needn’t tell us
anything but what we know, what the lights spell:
a guest as always, as already, here
as the damp ammoniac floor.
Ambiguous: is the “guest” Death or God? Probably both. No one is safe in Rowan Williams’ poetic world. Not for him the easy comforts of unlived religion, but a tough journey with moments of hope. As when he goes into an abandoned house:
Sudden movement: leaf or bird?
For a moment,
Damp soil escapes in light.
Or when he ends a group of short poems on the five senses with:
Each door from the room says,
This is not all. Your hands will find
in the dark.
These poems are muscular, rich and often difficult. But then why should poetry (sorry Joanna Lumley) be easy?
The Church of England is lucky to have a man with real poetic gifts leading it at a time when believers and unbelievers alike so often take refuge in crude oversimplification.
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