Perspectives by R. S. Thomas : The Poetry Foundation.
The young are not what they were, smirking at the auspices of the entrails. Some think there will be a revival. I don’t believe it. This plucked music has come to stay. The natural breathing of the pipes was to a different god.
This snippet of poem resonates with the part of me that realizes I’ve broken with the religious understanding of my past, and I won’t be going back to it. It’s not just that my religious practices are different, but my understandings of God and of religion are different too. The “naturalness” of breath in worship juxtaposed with the thought-out, crafted, and manufactured sound of the plucked music makes me think of another juxtaposition: that of interpreting natural disasters to tell us God’s mood vs. using science to understand God’s universe.
Woodwinds are good, but the music is made richer by the addition of strings. Promising to do what God wants if he will please not kill us in flood or earthquake is a starting point, but once you’ve observed a supernova 70 million light years away (SN2012ec) I think you need to revise the story you tell yourself about the role natural disasters play in the universe, and how they relate to you individually.