Advent Authors: Dylan Thomas

HYMN 1: lo He Comes with Clouds Descending

BBC Wales Recording, Serendipity Choir

Good morning and welcome to Sunday Worship on this second Sunday in Advent: this season of the Church’s year is very brief, so it’s wonderful to take these moments of prayer and reflection together, to press pause and intentionally to look forward to the birth of Jesus Christ.

This season is also an opportunity to reflect on what Christmas means – to us, to the world around us, and to some of our great writers from each of our four nations. Today I’m in an Edwardian suburban detached house at Number 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea. It’s the birthplace of Dylan Thomas, poet and master of comic prose, as in his Child’s Christmas in Wales. In this Sunday Worship I’ll be talking to one of the guides at this house, about Dylan’s less well-known religious leanings. I’ll also be talking to students at a local Catholic Comprehensive school about what they make of Christmas, and Dylan Thomas’s version of it.

Let’s take a moment in prayer to begin, borrowing words from the Mass of today.

O people of Sion, behold,
the Lord will come to save the nations,
and the Lord will make the glory of his voice heard
in the joy of your heart.

Almighty and merciful God,
may no earthly undertaking hinder those
who set out in haste to meet your Son,
but may our learning of heavenly wisdom
gain us admittance to his company.
Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.
Amen.

Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales celebrates one aspect we might associate with this time of year – a scene of gently falling snow, and a time of warm exchanges of presents and stories. He says this:

One Christmas was so much like the other, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

That extract was read for us by Welsh children’s poet Alex Wharton.

Dylan Thomas wrote those nostalgic words around 1945, at a time of global horror – bombs, atrocities, senseless deaths. No wonder he invited his readers to reminisce about more innocent times, times before Swansea itself was decimated by a blitz, marks of which can even today be seen on certain walls.

We might well hold Thomas’s image of white Christmas in stark contrast to the war taking place around him. However, Christians believe that it was exactly because of the brokenness of our world that God enters human history in the little child born in Bethlehem. He himself is the peace that the world craves so much. His entrance into the world is the dawn of salvation. We look to that dawning hope in our first hymn, Let all mortal flesh keep silence.

Hymn 2: Let all mortal flesh

Scottish Festival Singers

All the Christmases roll down towards the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.

Looking through the windows, I can start to appreciate what Dylan Thomas meant by the two-tongued sea, the expanse of Swansea bay, and the delight he may have felt in the innocent look and feel of snow. It’s a far cry from the world in which he actually lived in 1945, when A Child’s Christmas in Wales was first commissioned for children’s hour. The ‘ugly lovely’ town as he described Swansea was no more – the centre had been obliterated, the familiar streets destroyed by bombs. I’m with one of the guides to the house, Geoff Haden, Swansea born and bred:

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Strike in the time-bomb town,
Raise the live rafters of the eardrum,
Throw your fear a parcel of stone
Through the dark asylum,
Lapped among Herod’s wail
As their blade marches in,
That the eyes are already murdered
The stocked heart is forced, and agony has another mouth
To feed.

The innocent age was no more. Those lines from a poem ‘A Saint about to Fall’ are difficult, but seem to speak to this understanding of a broken world. I wonder where else we can think of examples of brokenness around us? It’s sometimes simpler – and much more attractive – to retreat to an ideal version of childhood, a time before struggles, a time before brokenness. As we hear our first reading from the prophet Isaiah, we hear the same desire, to reset the world to a more innocent age: but interestingly he speaks in the future tense, not looking back in nostalgia. He speaks of one who is able to make this peace a reality.

READING – Isaiah 11:1-10 

It’s hard to imagine wolves lying with lambs, leopards lying with kids. Isaiah whispers hope into the context he lived in, of waiting for a child, a Messiah, someone innocent of all danger who would share that reality with others – a Messiah who wants to share that reality with us.

I’ve come to Bishop Vaughan School, a Catholic comprehensive in Swansea. I want to hear from the students what they make not only of this season of Advent, but also of Swansea’s – and maybe Wales’s – most famous writer.

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As crass as the question might sound, into which of these categories would we put the greatest gift ever received by this world, the Christ child himself? Useful? The presence of God himself coming to save us is hardly useful in the sense of a hand-knitted scarf, or a woollen vest! And there again, Thomas makes the useless presents sound much more fun – marzipan, games, gadgets… and as Christians, we believe coming to know Jesus is the greatest joy imaginable in this life and in the next.

The choir of Bishop Vaughan school will now sing ‘Light of the World’ by Lauren Daigle

Hymn 3: School Choir, LIGHT OF THE WORLD

We come now to our Gospel reading, taken from Matthew chapter 3, verses 1-12.

SERMON

In our Old Testament reading we were placed in a world of restored peace that’s hard to imagine, with predators relaxing next to their prey – images as arresting as those of Dylan Thomas, who also imagines a world of peace in a context where violence is the norm. It’s the gift of our greatest poets and writers to lead our imaginations into a transcendent reality. If this were not attainable, the author’s work would be a complete fiction – a mirage, which when faced with the actual reality on our TV screens, in our newspapers, and perhaps even closer to home, disappears as a phantom. Maybe this malaise influences the way many of us might approach the pages of scripture: not as a definite promise of a world that will look like that, but rather as another poem that’s pleasant to read, but ultimately another child’s story that is destroyed by the ways of the world.

This malaise needs to be shaken up sometimes – to remember that the brokenness for which we have so much evidence is not the norm. It isn’t how the Master has intended it. And it isn’t how the Master has left it, but rather that he himself is the offering that puts everything right. Characters such as the one we meet in our Gospel reading can help us with this. However unusual his clothing and his diet, John the Baptist is a man of absolute conviction. Conviction shakes up the way we see the world. Oftentimes it isn’t the words of a carefully crafted talk or sermon that touch us most deeply, but rather the personal testimony of someone who speaks of what God has done in their lives. John is such a one. He allows the clarity of his belief in the coming Messiah to influence his whole manner of being. He condemns the religiosity of the leaders at the time which obscured the simplicity of the Christ child. He is unwilling to see the brokenness around him as the norm, and he invites us to hope in the same – that there is an end to the violence, mistrust, abuse and neglect that we see around us – in a word, the sin of the world, and mine, and yours. Jesus Christ is himself the medicine and the healing for a world exhausted by its sinfulness.

In A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Thomas uses childhood as a motif for how we might relate to the world around us – with tired eyes refreshed by a new season of hope in our lives. Here are a few words in which we can almost taste the joy, the innocence – and the cheekiness! – of this conversation:

I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to the seaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets, leaving huge deep footprints on the hidden pavements.

"I bet people will think there've been hippos."

"What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?"

"I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill and then I'd tickle him under the ear and he'd wag his tail."

"What would you do if you saw two hippos?"

Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snow towards us as we passed Mr. Daniel's house.

"Let's post Mr. Daniel a snowball through his letter box."

"Let's write things in the snow."

"Let's write, 'Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel' all over his lawn."

We hear our next hymn: On Jordan’s Bank the Baptist’s cry, imagining ourselves as those standing around hearing this first proclamation of the Messiah, and startled by the freshness of the Baptist’s conviction.

Hymn 4: On Jordan’s Bank

BBC RECORDING Welsh chamber Singers

Dylan Thomas, a consummate wordsmith like so many countless others, specialises in creating an impression in his readers by the way the words fall. I remember a friend telling me that the ‘correct’ way to read poetry (if there’s such a thing) is to ask, how has this made me feel? What’s the mark these words are making inside me? What a remarkable reflection this is: that the gift of human language is not simply the communication of facts and figures from one mind to another (which is amazing already), but the invisible conjuring of dreams, images, hopes, fears, through the visible words that are written. Interesting, too, that for those without the sense of sight or hearing, attempts are made to translate words into a comprehensible form: through tangible lettering, or physical signs that relate to a spoken word. Words are fundamental to our communication.

As well as being an historical Messiah who restores peace, the Lord who is a lamb approaching the lion of our brokenness, Jesus Christ is described in his essence in the Gospel of John. He begins, ‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (Jn 1:1). Before all time, before any created thing, before our attempts to communicate with one another, the whole fabric of our existence was founded in one-who-is-Word. In Greek, the use of ‘logos’ expresses even more: pattern, reason, logic. God-the-Word, who takes flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, is himself what it is to communicate perfectly. He contains within himself the fulfilment of every desire I have to communicate myself. That longing to be understood by another: for the Christian, that is Jesus. This is breathtaking. Poets, writers, artists – they each seek to communicate something in part, which Jesus of Nazareth doesn’t only communicate better, but rather is the very centre of reason at the heart of all created matter. As we open our hearts to welcome a Saviour who is so fundamental to the world’s existence, and is the child crying in his mother’s arms, let’s hear some final thoughts of Dylan Thomas who speaks precisely of the power of the Word.

In the Beginning was the word
That from the solid bases of the light
Abstracted all the letters of the void;
And from the cloudy bases of the breath
The word flowed up, translating to the heart
First characters of birth and death.

We come now to our prayers of intercession, and I’m joined once again by the children of Bishop Vaughan School in Swansea:

We pray for our world which we love so much, and yet is torn apart by the decisions of human hearts to fight, to kill, to spread hate, to destroy. We pray for those who are most affected by the hurt done to our world, especially through war or through natural disasters. We pray that all human hearts would choose peace in their everyday lives. Lord, have mercy.

As we reflect on the work of Dylan Thomas, we give thanks for the work of poets and writers who have sought to use language to restore hope, to bring about peace, and to long for restored innocence. May we know the power of the Word himself, Jesus Christ, hidden in every page of the scriptures, and come to base our lives on the truth of his saving power. Christ, have mercy.

We pray for our society as we prepare to remember the birth of Jesus Christ this Christmas. May we be awoken from our expectation of brokenness, and be willing to be surprised by one who is himself Good News for the world. Lord, have mercy.

We join all our prayers, spoken and unspoken, in the prayer that Jesus himself taught us to pray.

Our Father…

We hear our final hymn now, Come thou long expected Jesus.

HYMN 5: Come thou long expected Jesus

Choir of St David’s Cathedral Pembrokeshire

BLESSING

May the almighty and merciful God,
by whose grace you have placed your faith
in the First Coming of his Only Begotten Son
and yearn for his coming again
sanctify you by the radiance of Christ’s Advent
and enrich you with his blessing.

May the blessing of almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
come down on you and remain with you forever.
Amen.

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