Unextinguished

The gorse has been blazing yellow under a blue sky these past days, but today there was a fine, persistent rain in Glen Kin, where this photo was taken. And because it's Pentecost, and the fire of the Spirit has been much in the news and all over social media in the last 24 hours as well as in the liturgies of the faithful, I'm leaving a poem by my favourite poet, R.S.Thomas here for anyone to read and wonder at, for it describes what happened yesterday, in the unexpected surroundings of the Chapel Royal.

The Chapel

A little aside from the main road, 
becalmed in a last-century greyness, 
there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal 
to the tourist to stop his car
and visit it. The traffic goes by,
and the river goes by, and quick shadows 
of clouds, too, and the chapel settles
a little deeper into the grass.

But here once on an evening like this, 
in the darkness that was about
his hearers, a preacher caught fire 
and burned steadily before them 
with a strange light, so that they saw 
the splendour of the barren mountains 
about them and sang their amens 
fiercely, narrow but saved
in a way that men are not now.

R.S.Thomas