T.S. Eliot: Session 4

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 Guidance to the Teachings Found in TS. Eliot's poem, Four Quartets. The fourth and final poem we've now come to is titled Little Gidding. And Little Gidding is a chapel, a small chapel in the English countryside, where in the past, a community of people gathered for prayer. And so Little Gidding is really the grand finale of the whole poem. Because all through the poem, the struggle to find our way into primordial time beyond time, and it goes on and on and on and on. In the end, it's resolved in prayer, to kneel where prayer has been valid. And so really, this is also where it becomes explicitly mystical about God's oneness with us, woven into the suffering of our life, the love of our life, and every aspect of life itself is ultimately divine. And so it's really just a lovely, kind of eloquent kind of crescendo to the whole poem. And so with this in mind, we turn to the poem itself. And in the poem, TS. Eliot begins by telling us that midwinter spring is its own season, St. Paternal, though sodden toward sundown. suspended in time between pole and tropic, when the short day is brightest with frost and fire, the brief sun flames the ice on pond and ditches. In windless cold that is the heart's heat, reflecting in a watery mirror, a glare that is blindness in the early afternoon. So he is talking about a bitter cold winter day in brilliant sunlight. And the brilliant sunlight he is going to be saying is shining on the snow on the branches, the bushes and the trees. And the brilliance of the sun in the bitter cold stirs the dumb spirit. Dumb, I think, meaning like we can't hear, deaf and dumb, like we were not able to hear. The spirit, know when the Pentecostal fire in the dark time of the year between melting and freezing. So he is bringing one of these strange times again, like a timeless time, like a bitter cold day on a brilliant sunny day. And the Pentecostal fire is not the fire of time's covenant, he says. So this is not springtime with voluptuous sweetness, but a timeless frozen time. And he says, where is the summer, the unimaginable zero summer? So in the midst of this, you can't even imagine the summer so cold, like everything, it's that kind of time, kind of a primordial time that's so strange and mysterious to us in ego consciousness and time. And then he says, next step, if you came this way, and what he means, what way? If you came this way to little getting, if you would come this way with me to the chapel of little getting to join me in prayer, where prayer has been valid, if you came this way, here's the mystical part of the poem. I want to say up front how it helps me to see this. You know, in the previous poems, we simply can't handle or we can't effectively overtake the uncertainties of the fluctuations of primordial time with fires and floods and mishaps and struggles and so on. And especially in the inevitability of death. He says, but there's moments that we're conscious we're not in time, which are meditative states. In a meditative time, it's a moment of time transcending time. And then we see that our body dies. We're actually all eternal. Nobody dies. We momentarily are above it all. But the thing is we can't stay there because time reclaims us again with the day's demands, the losses, the pain, the struggle and so on. And it goes on and on and on. We do the best we can. What he's going to say is now going to happen. To come this way, if you came this way to little getting, is something different. And I want to set this up to help me to understand this as we walk through it line by line. See, what if when we die, like a candle blowing out, it's nothing? There is no life after death. It's just nothingness. Then it really wouldn't matter how we lived, in a way. Because no matter how we lived, it ends in nothing. But what if instead of being nothing, what if it's infinite? What if the infinite love of God is infinitely transforming us into the very infinite love of God? Like the divinity of us, boundless in all directions forever. Then it really doesn't matter how we live, if when we die we spill over into the eternal infinity of God. And what's possible is we can start to spill over into the infinity of God by realizing in prayer. We don't need to rise above time in timeless moments. And here's where it gets specifically Christian and mystical. Why? Because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. That Jesus did not consider his equality with God a condition to be clung to. And so the infinite presence of Jesus as God, has entered into time. So now, this is God's oneness with us in the eternality of the ticking of the clock, the sun moving across the sky, of standing up and sitting down. And Paul says, for me to live is Christ. That in Christ, God is living our life. God is suffering our suffering. God is dying our death, a death that ends in resurrection. And that's prayer. It's in prayer that we kneel to the grace of the Spirit to internally realize the incarnate infinity of the love that loves us so. That it's in prayer that this abides. So he said, if you came this way, namely this way that's going to lead you to the moment of prayer, where you're going to realize that the infinite presence of God is present in the passing moments of your life as God is the holiness of life itself. So now I'm going to walk through it line by line. If you came this way, taking the route you would be likely to take, probably the one you take each day from your home, wherever you go. But you're going to end up in Little Gidding because you got to start from your house to get there. If you came this way in May time, you would find the hedges white again in May with voluptuary sweetness. It would be the same at the end of the journey. So when you walk there in the voluptuous May, when you finally got to Little Gidding, it would still be in the middle of May, when you got there, when you arrived at the door of the church of Little Gidding. If you came at night like a broken king, in history in the past there was a king who lost a battle, and he came to Little Gidding to pray. So if you came from your own house where you would normally come, or if you would come at night like a broken king, it doesn't matter because when you kneel in prayer, it's infinity. So it's the same thing, it doesn't matter. If you came by day not knowing what you came for, you're looking for something but you don't know what you're looking for, and you end up at Little Gidding. Life's like that a lot of times. But it doesn't matter that you didn't know why you came. Why? Because you're at Little Gidding. Because when you kneel, it's God. It would be the same when you leave the rough road and turn behind the pigsty to the dull facade. And here's my Advent meditation that I give about the pigsty. The Advent meditation that I give is, it says in the scriptures that when Mary was about to give birth, she was in the last time of her pregnancy, she had to, by order of the Roman authority, had to be taken by Joseph to Bethlehem to sign the census. Everyone had, all the Jews had to sign in the census of the place of their birth. And so they went on this hard, arduous journey. And when they got to Bethlehem, she went into labor. But there was no room in the inn, because all the other pilgrims were there too. So she gave birth in the dark in a stable. So the lesson is this, see there was no room in the inn, but Jesus came anyway. So here's the point, it's this. We might say, our life is too busy, there's no room for God, but God comes anyway. The world's too crazy, there's no room for God, but God comes anyway. We're too confused, but God comes anyway. But we got to be willing to leave the light and the noise and the hurly burly of the inn and go alone in the dark to the stable, which is the poverty of our heart and humility. And God's waiting for us there. And the tombstone, which is death, the cemetery, the deathless nature of death of those who no one ever dies. And what you thought you came for is only a shell or a husk of meaning. You thought you knew why you were going. Like back in the days when you were so holy, it was so clear. But along the way, you're not so sure anymore what it all means, even. And there you are at the door of little getting, just like the husk of meaning. From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled. So the purpose you came for, it breaks wide open when it's fulfilled by God in prayer. Beyond all expectations, beyond anything to be expected. It hasn't entered our mind what God has prepared for those who love Him. What God has prepared for us is God. If at all, it might not break at all in human terms, if you will, but still in the mystery of God, it breaks unexplainably. Either you had no purpose, you were just wandering around minding your own business, and ended up a little innocent matter. Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured. So you had a purpose. But when you got there and kneeled in prayer, it's beyond the end that you figured. See, it was unforeseeably incomprehensible.