Articles - From the Vicar

Always the same hills
Crowd the horizon,
Remote witnesses
 Of the still scene.
And in the foreground
The tall Cross,
Sombre, untenanted,
Aches for the Body
That is back in the cradle
Of a maid’s arms.

R.S.Thomas’ poem Pietà (this Italian word means ‘pity’) is a word painting that captures the essence of the many works of art in the western tradition that portray Mary cradling the dead Christ after he has been taken down from the cross, a scene to which the name pietà is traditionally given. The searing horror of the crucifixion is captured not in a description of Christ’s agonising death but in its aftermath: a mother tenderly holding the broken adult body of her child as she might once have held him as a baby. But the poem is no mere two thousand year old snapshot in time. The hills that are ‘the remote witnesses of the still scene’ imply our own complicity in the event, our own tendency to stand by mutely in the background while overwhelming economic and military forces continue to feed the appetite of the ‘aching Cross’ with the suffering of so many of the world’s population. Such suffering arises from a web of structural and personal sin into which we are all bound and which can only be dissolved by a deep commitment to live as well as to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay