The Chapel

It's not often that a piece of poetry sticks with me. Maybe that's because I rarely read poetry. For some strange reason I read quite a lot of Ogden Nash in college but that's been the limit of things. Last year I read Signs of Emergence (titled The Complex Christ in the UK) by Kester Brewin. The poetry in the book helped to set a different pace to things. There was one poem in particular that I've returned to several times. It's titled "The Chapel" by R.S. Thomas. Here it is:

A little aside from the main road, Becalmed in a last-century greyness, there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal to the tourist to stop his car and visit it. The traffic goes by, and the river goes by, and quick shadows of clouds, too, and the chapel settles a little deeper in the grass.

But here once on an evening like this,
in the darkness that was about
his hearers, a preacher caught fire
and burned steadily before them
with a strange light, so that they saw
the splendour of the barren mountains
about them and sang their amens
fiercely, narrow but saved
in a way that men are not now.

Something to think about as we prepare our hearts for the celebration of Pentecost Sunday.