Tag Archives: Four Quartets

Be a Voice, not an Echo!

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I recently saw a quip on Facebook that grabbed me, “Be a voice, not an echo.” I feel I have spent most of my life merely echoing what I have been taught and what I have been rewarded for thinking and believing. I have dutifully mirrored back what “they” have wanted in the interest of the approbation that is always promised for this behavior.

But, due to my own internal “non-sense,” I realized I wasn’t feeling the approbation in the first place. And I saw that I had been guilty of this spiritual “offense” and am finding that I live less in an echo chamber now.  But notice I said “less.” We can never think with perfect clarity…unless we achieve deity; and if I ever have intimations of having done that I hope someone is nearby with a hypodermic of industrial strength Haldol!  We always live and think in a context and we always have a human tendency to interpret things to fit with our old-brain, ego-template of the world. When this understanding comes to us, we can back off more readily with our “certainties” and allow some doubt to filter in, making room for others. I love that line from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets about the need to “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”

 

Wind Imagery and Transitoriness of Life

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T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is one my my favorite poems of all time, It is a powerful statement of mankind’s existential plight and of hope in the midst this hopelessness. He grasped the transitory nature of life and used vivid imagery to convey this. For example, in one of the Quartets (Burnt Norton) he wrote of, “Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind which blows before and after time. It reminds me of a favorite scene in the movie, American Beauty, when two characters are silently watching a video of the wind silently buffeting a plastic bag, conveying the same message of Eliot’s line.

And on the same existential theme, here is a poem by E. L. Mayo:

THIS WIND

This is the wind that blows
Everything
Through and through.

I would not toss a kitten
Knowingly into a wind like this
But there’s no taking

Anything living
Out of the fury
Of this wind we breathe and ride upon.

I conclude with the context of the Eliot quotation above:

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

 

I Want to be (Un)Famous!

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I think all of us want to be famous meaning we want to be admired and love more than we can possibly be.  We want to be the BMOC or BWOC.  And some of us get to be but most of us are confined to obscurity and left with the vicarious satisfaction that comes from glomming onto (identifying with) popular heroes—sports stars, movie stars, musicians, political figures…and in my case, literary greats.

But I think we can still take great satisfaction in being insignificant  For, life is inherently paradoxical, nothing is as it seems, and if we look carefully at what we are doing we can take great satisfaction in our meagre, “insignificant” station in life.  If we have the humility to realize that our prime responsibility is to merely show up and fulfill our responsibilities…mundane though they may be…then we are doing our part in keeping this dog-and-pony show afloat.  And that IS significant and we can take the same satisfaction that we could have if we were famous!  There IS glory and power in mere Be-ing.  And ultimately, there is found the only Glory and Power in the universe even for those who are the movers-and-shakers in our world.

T. S. Eliot advised us to “offer our deeds to oblivion.”  That was not nihilistic…he was a man of great Christian faith.  He was merely noting that we should live our life as productively and meaningfully as we can and then realize that the outcome is beyond us, and we must trust that our actions will be helping to the unfolding of God’s purpose.  Eliot, in the same marvelous poem, The Four Quartets, said that this faith requires merely, “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.”   Here is a marvelous poem by Naomi Shihab Nye about this type of “fame,” entitled, Famous:

 

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

“…Through a Glass Darkly.”

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Spiritual life involves a mystery. It is a mystery. This is because it is about the very heart of our existence and our existence is a mystery. Modern science is bearing this out. The Bible and other holy writ have long said as much.

This mystery can be apprehended…and I use the term loosely…by faith. For, “Faith is the evidence of things unseen and the …..” We lay hold to eternal truth only by faith and as we “lay hold” on this truth we are deeply aware of the flimsy nature of this grasp, intensely aware that the object of our faith always eludes our cognitive grasp which serves the purpose of keeping us humble. “We see through a glass darkly” and “we hold this treasure in earthen vessels.”

When we are teased with the notion, “Oh, I have arrived” a discerning spirit will let us know, “Oh, no. You are just en route!” To borrow from the astute judgment of Karl Barthes (I think!), “We are in love with the object which recedes from the knowledge of it.”

T. S. Eliot put it this way in The Four Quartets:

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.

And then I’d like to share from wisdom attributed (falsely) to Oscar Romero, the actual author being Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw, Michigan:

A Future Not Our Own
It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of
saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession
brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives include everything.
This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s
grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the
difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not
messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

(This quotation from the Bishop comes from a blog by Blue Eyed Ennis on wordpress.com. This blog is always a treasure trove of spiritual wisdom.)

The Ephemeral Nature of Words

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The beauty of words stems largely from their ephemeral nature. Conrad Aiken described words as “these squeaks of ours”. Poets spend their life contriving meaning out of these “squeaks”, a process which T. S. Eliot described as, “wrestling with words and meanings.

The poet is very aware of this ephemerality of language. They know firsthand how flimsy the conjunction between a simple mere sound…a “word”…and subjective experience can be; and always is when any particular word is first formed. Carl Sandburg described this as “the moment of doom when the word is formed.” (See full poem in posting of 10/28/12 ) And listen to Eliot describe his experience:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
(Four Quartets)

And I love Archibald MacLeish likening this poetic moment to “the flight of birds flung from the branches where they sleep”:

Bewildered with the broken tongue
of wakened angels in our sleep
then lost the music that was sung
and lost the light time cannot keep!
There is a moment when we lie
Bewildered, wakened out of sleep,
when light and sound and all reply:
that moment time must tame and keep.
That moment like a flight of birds
flung from the branches where they sleep,
the poet with a beat of words
flings into time for time to keep.

 

Words must be vibrant, alive, dynamic!

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A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules… Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. ~ Wade Davies

This is why language is so rich and so worthy of exploring. Words can “open up” and reveal hidden meanings and can do so endlessly; and, as noted yesterday, this is the task of poets. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel once wrote that words have meaning because they can “burgeon forth into regions beyond themselves.” But one has to be willing to let them open up, to “burgeon forth.”

Unfortunately, words can be (and often are) taken literally. No effort is taken to parse words and individuals who take this route are left with the “letter of the law.” And of course we remember what 2 Corinthians teaches: the letter killeth but the Spirit maketh alive.

Let me share from the profound wisdom of T. S. Eliot on the dynamic nature of language:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
(The Four Quartets

 

Richard Rohr on Humility

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I quote Richard Rohr more than any contemporary spiritual leader. Once again I strongly recommend that you subscribe to his free daily blog as it is always very insightful and very encouraging. He says everything I could ever say and says it much better and much more succinctly.

In his book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, he noted, “I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then I must watch my reaction to it. In my position, I have no other way of spotting both my well-denied shadow self and my idealized persona.”

Rohr is very attuned to the pernicious presence of the ego in all spiritually-inclined people and is forthright about wrestling with his own ego daily. I think that his daily prayer for “one good humiliation a day” is his way of asking for his eyes to be opened daily to his own frailty and egotism. For, it is often very humiliating when this happens to someone, especially one who holds himself/herself forth as a “spiritual person.”

I do not think he is calling for us to deliberately go out and humiliate ourselves each day. He is merely asking us to pay attention, to be honest with ourselves, to practice “mindfulness” and be prepared to embrace the subjective experience of a sudden illumination about our own “flesh” being hard at work in our spiritual practice. This might be merely being taken aback, or given pause, or embarrassed, or yes it might be occasionally humiliating. It might even be as simple as a “Rick Perry moment” when we have to say “oops” to some obviously self-serving spiritual enterprise.

T. S. Eliot noted in The Four Quartets:

Oh the shame of motives late revealed,
And the awareness of things ill done
And done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

Loss and spiritual experience

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Recently in a blog I borrowed a line from one of Donovan’s songs from the ‘sixties (First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.) and translated it into, “First there is a God, then there is no God, then there is.”    I was addressing the need to recognize that we learn a conceptual god early in our life, and must lose that god if we are to know God.  Someone has actually written a book about this subject, Anatheism:  Returning to God after God.

Richard Kearney delved into religion, philosophy, and literature to address the need of undergoing loss at some point in one’s spiritual development.  This loss, known in theology as kenosis (or self emptying) is articulated elegantly by Etty Hillesum, and quoted by Kearney:

One has to free oneself inwardly of everything, of all existing representations, of all slogans, of all comforts.  One has to have the courage to let go of everything of all standards and all conventional certainties.  One has to dare taking the giant leap…then life will be endlessly overflowing, even amidst the deepest suffering.

And Hillesum knew what she was talking about.  This was not an armchair hermeneutics exercise for her—she suffered persecution in Germany for being Jewish and eventually died in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of 29.

T.S. Eliot wrote in The Four Quartets that we must be willing to “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain, and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”  The thing most certain for some—god—often needs to be discarded so that—God—might surface.

It is only in loss that we come to know our Source intimately.