Telling God about His Own Disbelief: The Honest Praise to the Lord by R. S. Thomas

Telling God about His Own Disbelief: The Honest Praise to the Lord by RS Thomas

Yin-ching WU

This essay on the famous Anglican Welsh poet priest, RS Thomas, is more a set of personal study notes than an academic paper. It is divided into three parts. The first discusses his lifelong struggle with an internal rioting “disbelief” in the God, whom he committed himself to and spent his whole life serving. The second part tells about the loneliness caused by his eccentricity in character and how that eventually turned into a kind of chosen solitude and a special relationship between God and himself. The third part is about how he looked at his own art — the poetry he was trying to present to the world. He managed to move his Christian readers deeply because he was always trying to be honest to God even though he thought he “might” lose his salvation for being so.