The annihilation of difference

It begins to appear
this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you, of you in me. . .
Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to that snake-haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.

RS Thomas, from ‘Emerging’, Collected Poems 1945-1990

For most of my life – in fact since about the age of five – my life seems to have been centred on silence, stillness, the presence of something overwhelming but infinitely desirable, unnamable but closer somehow than my own breathing. Of course I didn’t even try, as a young child, to name it – or even really to try and think about it at all. It merely was.

Ever since then, I have been trying to find words. Words to tell others, certainly, but more than that, words to tell myself where I have been. (Words for this kind of thing are never in the present tense – they must refer to something remembered, to some trace in the mind left by the God behind whom the door has already closed.) And words, it seems, bring community. That is perhaps what they are for, after all. But communities own their words, own their people; or so they feel.

I have found myself, of course, borrowing words wholesale from others who have come this way before. But they are others’ words, however sublime they may be, however hallowed by time and tradition. In these late years all I can do is try to speak of what still leaps up in my heart at echoes, snatches of music, phrases from the Psalms, sunlight through high windows. I know RS Thomas’ hard-found annihilation of difference – it is what has haunted me all these years. It lies beneath my sitting every night and morning. It will be waiting for me, softly, after my last breath. I have no other name for it, since it is no thing. Dear, endless, it merely is.