T.S. Eliot: Listener Questions (Part One)

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've been turning to TS. Eliot and his poetry in four quartets. And in today's session, we'll be hearing from our listeners who've sent in some incredible questions. And because we had so many that we wanted to address, we've split this episode into two parts. So today will be part one. And I'm here with Jim to get started with some listener questions. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:51)

Glad to be here and go through this such rich, beautiful reflection.

Kirsten Oates (0:56)

Yes, as per every season, we got some amazing questions.

James Finley (1:00)

Great questions, beautiful.

Kirsten Oates (1:02)

Heartfelt responses to this season. Yeah, excellent. Well, we've got a number of questions to get through, so let's dive in. The first question is from Brian.

Thank you so much for revealing the subtle beauty of TS. Eliot's poetry to us. In the first stanza of Burnt Norton, the poem contains the line, and the lotus rose quietly, quietly. You then mention the story of the Buddha, and slowly chanting, slowly, slowly blooms the rose within with Father Thomas' hand. This brought to mind one of Thomas Merton's conferences on William Faulkner's Sound and the Fury. In his talk, Merton defines the biblical concept of time as a ripening or fullness. According to Merton, our experience of time should be living in anticipation and expectation of God's fullness. Merton uses the example of Mary giving birth to Jesus, and in my own life, I think of the weeks leading up to marriage with my wife. Can you please talk a bit more about what our attitudes should be towards linear time, and how experiencing time as fullness or ripening might free us from what you describe as our claustrophobic, one-dimensional view of time?

James Finley (2:17)

Yes, that's a good question. And of course, it's right at the heart of the poem, because it's these insights into the relationship of eternity and time, kind of meditation on time. Here would be one way that helps me to see this. I want to use it to, Jesus is the Christ, but also as a Jewish mystic. We would often talk about the coming of the kingdom of God. Sometimes he would speak of the coming of the kingdom as the fullness of time. It would be God's ultimate victory of love over suffering and death. In other passages, he says we should prepare for the coming of the kingdom by living lives of love and lives of mercy in our heart. The third sense is the sense of the coming of the kingdom as an event in consciousness. There's like an awakening in consciousness of the eternal presence of God presencing itself as the presence of the present moment. So it's very mysterious because in one sense it's unfolding, it's anticipatory, but in some sense the fullness that we're anticipating is already completely and mysteriously present in the unfolding itself, increasing ambivalence between means and ends. The end is infinite, but as you follow along the path toward the end, you discover the fullness of the end welling up beneath your feet on the way to the end. And so you see that paradoxical interplay between time and eternity this way throughout the whole poem, really.

Kirsten Oates (3:51)

Yeah, beautiful. It does help even what you've described there about leaning into the fullness of time in the present moment is one of the ways we escape that claustrophobic sense of time.

James Finley (4:05)

That's right. Another way that helps me to see it, too, is that, see, what we're talking about, we're talking about living in incremental realizations of infinite generosity. It's that the generosity of the infinite is infinite. That is, the fullness of time is now because nothing's missing in it. The infinity of the gods completely poured out as the infinity of the mystery of now. What's incremental is the extent to which we're aware of that. So we're living in increasing incremental realizations of the infinity of the immediacy of God's life itself. And that's another way of putting words to the paradox.

Kirsten Oates (4:45)

It's interesting the idea of marriage, this person's marriage, because the love between the two is present in the anticipation of the fullness of the marriage. It's kind of like you're saying that incremental.

James Finley (4:57)

That's true. And we were doing the merit of the nuptial mystics, Teresa and John, where they saw marriage really as a sacrament of this, because in marriage itself, in marital love, each of them as they go through their life together in time, they experience the eternality of love. But also in their love, in time, each one of them is going to die. But in love, they see in each other that in them that's too beautiful to die. So marital love is also like a rich context for this.