T.S. Eliot: Session 1

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:10)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time together, Turning for Trustworthy Guidance, to TS. Eliot's poem, Four Quartets. In the introductory session that I did with Kirsten, we noted that the autobiographical foundations of TS. Eliot's poetry is a theme of suffering. And it comes at a societal level, in that he lived through the First World War, and then also lived through the Second World War. So he knew this widespread despair and trauma and nightmare and chaos. And in a poem he wrote called The Wasteland, it captured that despair and the darkness of the world. But later on, as his life moved on, we see in this poem Ash Wednesday, and in this poem, Four Quartets, a new theme emerging. And the theme that's emerging is the theme of offering guidance in finding our way to be experientially grounded in God's presence in our life. That transcends the suffering, sustains us in the suffering. And an inner peace that doesn't necessarily take away the suffering, but it delivers us from the tyranny of suffering, because the love of God we're learning to be established in sustains us in it and transcends it. So really the poem is about experiential salvation. It's a poem of this transformative awakening of ourself, which makes them among the mystics. We explore together these reflections. So the theme then is really for Eliot, is that the foundations of suffering, or this is the word trauma like woundedness. The foundations of our traumatizations, great and small, that can and sometimes do occur, are not found among the traumatizing things that can and sometimes do happen. As terrible as they might be. Nor are the foundations present in the way they access us and linger on within us as symptoms of traumatization. As challenging of those might be. The root of suffering is the traumatized capacity to abide in the presence of God that alone is ultimately real. So how can we find guidance to be experientially established in that? Which you understand is this Christ consciousness. And the whole poem is going to gravitate toward the mystery of the cross. So with that then, we'll begin by noting to that the poem Four Quartets actually consists of four poems that are intimately related to each other, that continue to explore this theme of deliverance from suffering in the midst of suffering, deliverance from death in the midst of death. And so the first poem, Burnt Norton, begins first, as you saw, as an actual place. And TS. Eliot's first theme is the way we can begin to be delivered from the tyranny of suffering, is to be delivered from a claustrophobic understanding of time. They were kind of trapped in a one-dimensional experience of time. And so the whole poem invites us to prayerfully reconsider or reflect upon how to find our way to the eternality of God that transcends and permeates time as deliverance. And so the setting for the poem, Burnt Norton, is an actual place. It's the charred ruins of a manor house. And we're in the past, the end time. A horrendous series of events happened. That the person in this manor house fell in love with this woman. He began to court her. Took her to the manor house. She said she'd marry him. She said the butterfly needs wings. If you build an extension on both sides of your manor house. And he did. She moved in and it turned out to be a horrible, horrendous thing and she cheated on him. And so in a kind of a blind rage, he killed her. Set the manor house on fire and then killed himself. So that's where the poem starts. So the poem really is like Golgotha. That is it starts in a place and when we go there, you can go there and visit it. So we're in the charred ruins of this abandoned manor house. And we can feel the heaviness of what happened here, all this. And so this takes us to the charred ruins of the places in our life where trauma happened. The places in the world where it's happening now. And the scene of Burt Norton becomes a kind of metaphorical place of suffering both in the past and how it lives on within us. And in this context then, he's going to guide us in this journey of awakening, of experiential salvation. So I'm going to read the first stanza of Burt Norton. And notice also the poem is divided into Roman numerals. And so this is the first stanza, Roman numeral one, how the poem starts. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk through the poem and pause and share with you what I see in it. because like with all these mystics we've been studying, it's very dense. I mean it's poetically dense. And so I'm going to share with you what's helped me to what I see in it. So as you listen to this, it will help you to see what you see in it. because really it's an invitation to be guided into these interior sensitivities within ourself. So with that then we'll begin. Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future. And time future is contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable. So if in the past, this horrendous event happened here at Burt Norton, what happened in the past lives on when over there we can feel the weight of the tragedy that's there. And in all the years yet to come, anyone who goes here is aware of it, they'll feel the weight of it too. So if all time is present, it's locked in. Likewise, in our own life, if we've been through things in the past that were traumatizing, even though the event was past, it'll always be the past, our past that we remember. And when it comes to mind, we feel the pain of it and how it affects us. And no matter how long we live, it'll always still be the past, up to the very moment we die. And that sense in time is unredeemable if it's locked in. What he's gonna try to show us is that it's not locked in. That's what the poem's about, really. So it's like a meditation on how we experience our temporal self and our passage through time from birth to death, and also the passage of time of the world, of history. because if it's all locked in that way, what might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation. In other words, yes, this did happen here at this Matterhouse. But you know what? What if it wouldn't have happened? But what could have happened remains a coulda, coulda, shoulda, woulda. So even though we can consider what could have happened, maybe he could have avoided doing that or could have avoided. The point is, it's all an idle speculation in the mind, in your life, in my life. What might have been and what has been point to one end which is always present. And that's what's always present. What's always present is what was. What's always present is what could have been and wasn't. And that could have been that wasn't. And what was, live on in our present as we look at our life, this is what life is like. So he's inviting us to slow down, almost like in psychotherapy, to pay very close attention to the nature of our consciousness, like how we can settle in. And by the way, when we settle in like this, we're settling into it in a moment of time. Namely, this moment of time in which we're listening to Eliot guide us into this deeper awareness of time. Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden. My words echo thus in your mind. So footfalls echo in the memory. That is, there's these footfalls. But where do the footfalls go? Toward the passage we didn't take, the door we didn't open. In the light of the poem, what's the door we never open? Mysticism. We never considered, we never opened the door of eternality. It's true that our bodies, everything born in time, dies in time. But we never considered that although our body, born in time, dies in time, in the deathless beauty of ourselves as God, beloved, we're eternal. We never paused to take into account the eternality of ourself. That which never passes away, that keeps unfolding and everything endlessly passing away. So this is where the poem is taking us. My words echo thus in your mind. And they echo there like we paused to ponder this. You know, this is like a deep thought. I mean, this is, we just don't look at this in passing and, you know, next in sight, please. We're kind of sitting with something. But to what purpose? See, disturbing dust on a bowl of rose leaves, I do not know. In other words, why do this at all? Why? because in the ego self that lives in one dimensional time is of no purpose. But in the poetic language that opens up the layers of the soul, it's beyond purpose. It opens out up on the divinity of ourself, like the eternality of time. because it's also true that although we are in a place of suffering, of something in the past that happened and we feel it now in the present, that's also true. There's other things there. When we start to open the door of spiritual awakening, the stanza continues. Other echoes inhabit the garden. See, it's true that suffering is there, echoes of the suffering, but there's other echoes inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? And we know we are because he's going to take us there. Quick, said the bird. Find them, find them. Around the corner, through the first gate, into the first world, shall we follow the deception of the thrush into our first world? I'd like to reflect on this. See, what is the first world? The big picture. In the opening words of Genesis, in the beginning God said, let there be light. That's the first world. Let there be light. God's speaking light and time and you and me and the whole world is perpetual, and boundaryless. That's the first door. So we're going to go back to the beginning. because for God to begin the beginning, and God had to be there before the beginning to begin the beginning. And that's the door. And that's where we're headed, back to this place, this emergence from things. Through the first gate, into the first world, shall we follow the deception of the thrush? Lots of times, it's so personal, I want to make of what he's saying. I think it's this way. Is the thrush, the bird leading us into these deeper places, but the ego and claustrophobic time is skeptical. Like St. Augustine says, we have to believe in order to understand. because it's not deception, it's deception not to listen to the thrush. It's a deception not to let ourselves go deeper into our first world. There they were, dignified, invisible, moving without pressure over the dead leaves in the autumn heat. And there they were, whose they, it's the dead. Not just the man and woman who died there are there, because they're deathless too, nobody dies. But it's all the dead, all the dead are there. He keeps alluding to things. He's trying to help us be experientially sensitive to what faith proclaims. When I was in the monastery, an old lay brother died, and Thomas Merton spoke that day to the novices about death. He said, it's very important to keep in mind that when we die, we don't go anywhere when we die, like to some far off place, because scripture says, in God we live and move and have our being. We're living out our lives in the vast interiority of God. We're like manifestations of God, living in the interiority of God, seeking God. Seeking God because we've lost the awareness of the divinity of our situation, which is suffering. And not only are we living our life in God and we're present in God, but all those who have passed through the veil of death have crossed over into God, and they're here, which is the communion of saints. You know, sometimes when a loved one dies, there's this horrendous pain of the absence of the beloved. It's an unbearable thing. But as time passes, we begin to feel the deathless presence of the beloved. And so this is the communion of saints. So right now as I'm speaking this and right now as you're listening to this, you and I are together in the interiority of God. And all the dead are here with us. All the angels are here. All the saints are here. All everything is here. And we don't see it. See, we might put it another way. What we're getting at here is we don't see the dead for the same reason we don't see God. because in the one-dimensional temporal time of the ego, it lives at the surface of things. So what the poem is doing is slowly opening things up to poetically kind of sit with these deeper layers that we know by faith are there. And to help us be more present to it, more attentive to it. In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, and the bird called, in response to the unheard music hidden in the shrubbery. It's the music that our finite ears can't hear. Just like it's the presence of the angels and the dead and God that our finite eyes can't see. St. John of the Cross talks about silent music. I can remember in the monastery chanting the Psalms, the sense that that chanting is an echo of that silent music of God through all of creation. And notice this poem has a certain cadence to it. It itself is kind of like a music. As we listen to it and kind of let it have its way with us, it's opening up this deepening sensitivity to ourselves, the ultimate nature of our situation as we're here together.