In the Dark

Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.

One Response to “Via Negativa, by R.S. Thomas”

1. 

   SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ Says:
   February 24, 2026 at 10:14 pm

   Dear Professor Cole,

   Thank you for featuring one of the poems of R.S. Thomas, namely, “The Absence”. I would like to assert that new voices must be found and nurtured to challenge conventional Christianity.

   If there was a God, what would they be like? Given the number of Christian denominations and groups, even if this question could be answered, it would be sociopolitically fraught with contentions, disagreements and controversies, perhaps even more acutely so, as we drift and slide on the increasingly widening contemporary path towards fostering interfaith dialogue and diverse viewpoints, which are deemed to be important for those who wish to cast away their former spiritual/intellectual cocoon and overcome their epistemological impasse, thereby emerging anew as a changed person who has examined their lives conscientiously so as to become a better human being, or even a born-again freethinker.

   In any case, the question is hard to answer because even the concept of discernment demands critical examination. After all, do theologians and priests, let alone Christian laypersons, fully comprehend the nature of reality and truth, especially when it gels very poorly with the neat and tidy stipulations, moral issues and cornerstones promoted by scriptures and dogmas?

   It is exceedingly difficult for some folks to acknowledge that religious indoctrination can be very insidious and damaging. Religious ideology is often significantly anti-thought-provoking or thought-terminating for those who aspire to seek truth via reason, logic and evidence as well as holistic (re)examinations and spiritual contemplation. For example, a lot of Christians would have great difficulty in accepting the messages and teachings of such an extreme Christian outlier as the late John Shelby “Jack” Spong (16 June 1931 to 12 September 2021), who would be unlikely or unwilling to answer the question presented by this post. I have known of him for more than two decades. He was an American bishop of the Episcopal Church, whose “Twelve Points for Reform” were elaborated in his 2001 book entitled A New Christianity for a New World:

   1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
   2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
   3. The Biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
   4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
   5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
   6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
   7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
   8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
   9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard written in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
   10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
   11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
   12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

   Spong was one of the first American bishops to ordain a woman into the clergy, in 1977. He was the first to ordain an openly gay man, Robert Williams, in 1989. In his 1991 book entitled “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture”, Spong argued that St Paul was homosexual.

   All in all, the late John Shelby Spong was to religion what the late Edward Osborne Wilson was to science.

   May you find the rest of 2026 very much to your liking and highly conducive to your health, writing, reading, thinking and blogging whatever topics that appeal to your intellectual exploration, artistic affinity, creative flair, spiritual vision and cosmological horizon!

   Yours sincerely,
   SoundEagle🦅

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