First, I’m thankful for Matt L — who’s taking the same T.S. Eliot course I was in last spring with my favorite Duke English professor — because he’s been posting up quotes of Eliot poems occasionally. They’ve been helpful for me this Holy Week, partly because I have feel very emotionally, mentally, and spiritually not-present with the Easter season. I feel not-here, I feel disconnected from the culmination of the Christian year, probably out of my own dry spiritual sense. Thus, Matt’s postings have reminded me of how much I enjoyed the later Eliot poems, focused on the Christian journey.
I find companionship in Journey of the Magi (“a cold coming we had of it…) and Song of Simeon (“I am tired of my own life and the lives of those after me”) as they lament the hardship and the dryness. Ash-Wednesday is a sort of vicarious/companion play-act of confession or contrition (“I do not hope to turn again… I rejoice that things are as they are”). I enjoy most in Ash-Wednesday the humble, pitiful cry/confession: “Lord, I am not worthy / Lord, I am not worthy / but speak the word only.” Indeed, God’s speaking overcomes, overwhelms our unworthiness and fills up every crack.
Finally, I spent the last part of the morning’s “devotional” reading Marina – which was the end-piece of my paper on T.S. Eliot (sort of a survey of Eliot’s Christian journey). The narrator can hardly believe that he is come to the distant unseen shore that he’s sailed after for so long — “What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands / What watter lapping the bow / And scent of pine” etc. And how appropriate for Good Friday and Easter Sunday:
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the humming-bird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the stye of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
DeathAre become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
And even as the journey may be hard — “Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat… The rigging weak and the canvas rotten” – it’s all right. Marina is a welcome word to me, because the “place” I am in spiritually is so like a desert, but what Marina describes is the experience of grace and God’s love as a misty wonderful woodland shore. I am eager for a place so full of God’s presence that it is described as “grace dissolved.” That is a welcome Easter reminder.
