Suppose we had the revolution! and that an upheaval comparable to that of 1789 were once more to sweep away much of the existing Catholic fabric. How, in the light of the theology of post Vatican II, would we reconstruct our forms of Christian association?

The most obvious prophecy is that such associations would not be primarily or purely clerical in form. But they might well lead to a distinction between the originating association, which would be lay, and the foundation (or Congregation) which might become clerical, growing out of and serving the permanent needs of the association. An association would no longer be confined to a neighbourhood: it might be formed by lay-people living at a distance from each other, but united by a common aim and determination to develop a homogeneity of spirit. To form such an association would take many years, so that its character could not be pre-determined by simple manifestoes or rules: it would need time ‘to work clear’.

When the usefulness of the association had been proved, and its character made manifest, then and then only would it be time to see how a foundation could be established which would function as the permanent nucleus or heart. Some members of the association might be called out to minister on this more permanent basis. If Catholic, the membership of the association might want its foundation or congregation to be priests, the better to associate the work with the bishop and, through him, the universal Church. On the assumption that ‘the higher your building is the broader must be its base’, a slow growth to personal maturity would be the qualification for such candidates.

In the first of a series of lectures under the general heading, ‘Theology-Development or Deviation’, Fergus Kerr considered shifts in the way people are accustomed to think of the Church. He suggested that the central insights which have been recovered in recent years, though the beginnings of this recovery can be traced back well into the nineteenth century, are those of brotherhood and eschatology;- and he further suggested that this was not just a recovery of a long lost insight into the mystery of the Church but had been a real experience, though under a somewhat different guise and under very different names, in the English Catholicism of the inter-war years, in the ‘loud and draughty’ singing at benediction in a northern city parish for example. These two notions of brotherhood and eschatology are likely to recur constantly in discussing whether in any theological area there has been development or deviation, and certainly when the eucharist is in question.

It is probably in the area of the eucharist more than in any other that Catholics tend to suspect that there has been not so much development as deviation. That, no doubt, is because there has been a not insignificant change in eucharistic worship over these last ten years, a change altogether unlooked for by most Catholics, unlooked for, unexpected, and therefore viewed with some suspicion.

The purpose of this article is to examine the poems of R. S. Thomas and to attempt some exegesis of them from a theological point of view. So far as I know, this has not been attempted before. Naturally enough, the poems of this writer have already received considerable attention from a literary viewpoint, and critics and reviewers have established certain of their more obvious characteristics : their spare diction, their rich imagery, their hardness to the touch, the quality of perfection in some of the lyrics, their frequent mood of anger or near despair. The fact that the writer is a priest with a small country parish in Wales is, of course, always registered. It accounts for his concern with the countryside, with the difficult relationship between the life of the mind and the life of the land, for his concern with the past, present and future of the people of Wales. Doubtless there is much more to be done here. In this article however we shall not be doing it. Our purpose is rather to enquire into some of the underlying structures of Christian thinking which the poems reveal, and what their significance may be for the Christian believer who is trying to think through the meaning of his faith. Whatever ,else may be uncertain about R. S. Thomas, it is clear that he does not reveal his deepest thoughts and feelings easily. We shall have to look beneath the surface for the heart of what he is saying.

‘We piped to you, and you did not dance.’ And when people do dance, we tend to look down disapprovingly from our upper window, like the worthy lady Michal. She remained barren, and so do we.

It has perhaps become commonplace to say that ours is an age which has forgotten how to play (eutrapelia a forgotten virtue, and all that). There are even therapists to teach us how to play! But somehow, the Church seems to go on, doing all things in moderation and busily turning the Lord’s wine back hto water.

Now the books under consideration—admittedly a rather heady mixture—are all about wine, or attempts at wine.

Richard Neville in Play Power (the book was previously to be called Flower Power) offers us his, in many ways attractive, version of ‘the underground scene’. He admits to being himself only halfliberated, so perhaps he won’t mind another half-liberated person venturing to offer some comments from a slightly different angle. Richard Neville’s background is political, and his interest in play power is as a form of political movement (when I first met him, he confiied rather shamefacedly to still writing letters to the New Stateman). Earnest protest movements suddenly caught fire (turned into wine), and became parties, games; people began to preach revolution, not because it was important, but because it was fun. People began to have confidence just to ‘do their thing’ (which is highly revolutionary in its implications). The whole thing became ‘turned on’.

If the present writer could have been suspected of megalomania for his earlier article on The Role of the Church in Asia (New Blackfriars, January 1970), he should at least not be guilty of inconsistency. And so, in this sequel, on the one hand, the minimum view is advanced that the little island of Ceylon is an interesting case-study of the contemporary Church in Asia and, on the other, the maximum view that Ceylon’s place is crucial in the role-context of the Church in Asia and the World.

The basic figures of Ceylon’s demographic and geographic littleness are quickly enumerated. In the early 1960s, in a total Asian population of nearly 1,800 million, Ceylon had a population of nearly 11 million. In Asia’s total Christian population of 73 million, the Catholics numbered a little more than three-quarters of a million, while the other Christians numbered a little more than 100,000. Geographically, Ceylon is a small island, 25,332 square miles in area, situated at the southern tip of the Indian sub-continent and separated from it by a narrow strip of shallow water.

Yet, Ceylon has an importance far greater than its size would warrant. Her people have a higher degree of literacy than in most other countries of Asia. The standard of living, though very low in comparison with Western attainments, is high for Asia. Her educational, political and religious institutions and her tri-lingual press are highly developed. Her systems of easy island communication and her position as a sea and air port of call between Europe and the East have made her important for world trade and have turned her capital city, Colombo, into a large and crowded cosmopolitan and commercial centre.