Dialogue 4: Little Gidding

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to Season 10 of Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to TS. Eliot and his book, The Four Quartets. And I'm here with Jim to discuss his session on the last poem in The Four Quartets, Little Gidding.

James Finley (0:39)

Yes, looking forward to walking through this together. It's a beautiful poem.

Kirsten Oates (0:44)

Yes, the book comes to a beautiful conclusion in this poem.

James Finley (0:48)

It does.

Kirsten Oates (0:49)

I really enjoyed your session, thank you.

Just to begin with, just like all the poems, this poem is grounded in a real place in England. So Little Gidding is an Anglican church. Well, it was the home of an Anglican community anyway, established in 1626 And I looked up the image on the internet, and it's a beautiful little chapel. And you can still visit that today, I believe.

James Finley (1:19)

Mm-hmm, I believe so, yes.

Kirsten Oates (1:21)

Yeah. But the big point for us in the poem is that this is a long-standing place of prayer. Is that right, Jim?

James Finley (1:30)

That's right. Because we're going to Little Gidding to kneel where prayer has been valid. So the poem kind of grounds itself there in prayer.

Kirsten Oates (1:42)

And I'm wondering how you see this poem overall in relation to the other three poems.

James Finley (1:47)

Yes. I see this poem as, I think of it as the grand finale of all four. In this sense, in the three previous poems, he's inviting us to reflect on time or the ways that we experience our passage through time from birth to death. And how we tend to live in a time that's exiled from the primordial time of nature, the changing of the seasons, at the end of each day, the light yielding to the darkness of the night, the waves of the sea and so on. So there is this kind of timeless, primordial time. He said, I think the river is a great brown god. And he says, this river is within us. This primordial rhythm is within our bodies, within us, but we tend to be exiled from it. And even deeper then, we tend to be exiled from eternity.

And so, we are trying to find a way to redeem the time. We are trying to find a way to ground ourselves in the eternality of each passing moment of our life. And the first three poems are like the precarious insights into this process. And there are certain moments where we become conscious for we are not in time, in the great barber when it starts to rain. And so there is a little hiatus, like a taste of eternity and time. But they are fleeting. They are fleeting. We get pulled back into time again. And so the poems go on and on that way, just looking at our life. But what happens in Little Getting, really, is he is going to invite us to join him in coming to Little Getting, to kneel where prayer has been valid. Because it is resolved in prayer. And in this sense for TS. Eliot, or such as a deeply Christian poem, is that we don't need to liberate ourselves from time. Because in Christ, the eternal presence of God has entered into time. That Christ is one with us in time. St. Paul says, for me to live is Christ. So Christ lives our life. Christ suffers our suffering. Christ dies our death. And in his resurrection is our resurrection. The dying words of Jesus on the cross is a dis-consummated. It's finished. But what we need to do is we need to kneel in prayer and open our heart to that. And that's what Little Gidding is about. Little Gidding is all about this devotional sincerity of opening our heart to this infinite eternal mystery that is already permeating each passing moment of our life. And that's the culminating beauty of the poem, how it all ends.

Kirsten Oates (4:28)

And Little Gidding doesn't specifically say the name of Jesus, say the name of Christ, but there's hints and references throughout the four poems and then specifically in this one as well. Can you just help us see that a little more clearly, Jim?

James Finley (4:43)

Yes. It reminds me of Tolkien in Lord of the Rings because Tolkien was a devout Catholic, but there's no mention of Christianity in it, but it's deeply spiritual. So, too, with TS. Eliot, it's deeply spiritual, but it's also Christian and one of his own Anglican faith. But in East Coker, he talks about the whole world is our hospital, and he talks about the Eucharist, that the flesh of the Eucharist, the flesh is our only food, the blood of Jesus is our only drink. So, there's like a little momentary where it's made explicit, but otherwise, he's bearing witness to the universality of God's presence in life itself. It's like Richard Rohr's understanding of Christ is a new word for everything.