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All Along the Watchtower

~ A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you … John 13:34

All Along the Watchtower

Tag Archives: TS Eliot

Sunday Poem: The Journey of the Magi

10 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by JessicaHoff in Epiphany, poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Magi, Sunday Poem, TS Eliot

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.


Things have been too busy to blog this week, but the one plus has been that I have been able to keep this, my favourite poem, from where it would normally have gone, on the feast of the Epiphany, until now.

It’s an odd poem to love because on the surface it is bleak. The epiphany appears to be that death would be welcome because it would bring an end to the torment and unease the unnamed Magus has felt since his encounter with the Nativity. It upturns the usual context in which we see the Magi – which is most commonly as part of our celebrations of the Nativity, in Christmas Nativity Plays and on cards. Eliot cuts to the heart of the matter.

We are told next to nothing about the “Three Kings/ Wise Men / Magi” and so Eliot has a clean canvass on which to paint. He evokes marvellously the “old dispensation” from which the Magi came – the summer palace, the “silken girls bringing sherbet”. The journey requires them to exchange these things for sets of unpleasant and trying experiences, to the point it all seems “folly.”

So far so good, that, you might say, was what is to be expected on a spiritual journey, even if you don’t know it. It’s familiar territory to us from Cavafy and Thomas – it is the journey that matters. But Eliot here takes his text from a sermon given by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes on Christmas Day 1622:

A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, ‘the very dead of winter.’

But where for Andrewes:

And these difficulties they overcame, of a wearisome, irksome, troublesome, dangerous,
unseasonable journey; and for all this they came. And came it cheerfully and quickly, as appeareth
by the speed they made.

Eliot is more, I want to say so I will say, realistic.

There is a fleeting, almost poignant note of release at the beginning of the second stanza, but the initial optimism is replaced by signs which puzzle the Magus, but not us. The “three trees” evoke for us an image of Golgotha. Then there are the vine leaves and the empty wine-skin, the men gambling with piece of silver. There is even the spectre of the white horse of the apocalypse. These things, hidden from the Magi, foreshadow what is to come.

But you might say, weariness, sore feet, bad hostels, grumpy guides, all these are common to any pilgrimage, suck them up pilgrim and concentrate on what is at the end. And here, for the Magi, it is the new-born Christ child. And yet, and yet, there is no revelation, no overwhelming feeling of “knowing”; indeed what is known, or at least intuited evokes the opposite of good cheer.

“it was (you may say) satisfactory”

Is that it? Was it all for that? But there is more. Back home the Magi cannot feel “at home”. The world they knew feels somehow wrong, alien, full of idols and false gods. The birth felt like a death, and the Magus intuits that what has died in the world he knew – but whilst it dies, the new one is not clear to him. He knows inwardly that a new life comes only with death.

In his sermon, Bishop Andrewes said:

And we, what should we have done? Sure these men of the East will rise in judgment against the men of the West, that is with us, and their faith against ours in this point. . . . Our fashion is to see and see again before we stir a foot, specially if it be to the worship of Christ. Come such a journey at such a time? No; but fairly have put it off to the spring of the year, till the days longer, and the ways fairer, and the weather warmer, till better travelling to Christ. Our Epiphany would sure have fallen in Easter week at the soonest.

Yes. We crave comfort. We know the spiritual journey will not contain it, so we put it off, or we tell ourselves it will be okay, and all things will be well in the end, and that if it is not all well then it is not yet the end. But Eliot offers us naught for our comfort. In this broken world there are costs in spiritual rebirth, and if we expect to be at home here afterwards, we shan’t be. The way is hard and only our faith keeps us on it.

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Advent Book: Waiting (2)

30 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, poetry

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

RS Thomas, TS Eliot

In a Country Church
To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind' s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.
Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man's body.

As Mother Carys comments, this poem is esepcially suitable for Advent, because although this season is not as penitential as Lent because ‘we look forward to the presence of God with us in the incarnation’, it does not ‘preclude penitence and apprehension.’ (p.7).

The first verse resonates with me in a number of ways. In the first place it brings forth to my mind Eliot’s Little Gidding where he reminds us of the purpose of the Church:

You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

And here the one praying does so in silence. It does not seem at first sight as though this is the rich silence of Adoration. There is a barren quality to it – signified by the ‘wind’s song’ and the ‘dry whisper’ of the bat’s wings – no angels in glory here.

This is the second sense in which this resonates with me. I have been into many country churches, some of which can seem desolate, as though the Spirit is gone from them. I have knelt in prayer and felt much as Thomas describes.

But that is where ‘waiting’ matters. We wait in faith, we pray in faith. Being in a place hallowed by prayer I always feel as though I am with others, their prayers soaked into the walls, and if I stay kneeling long enough, and wait, then yes, there can come what Eliot describes here:

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

And Thomas knew this. He sees ‘love in a dark crown of thorns blazing.’ The Cross, which is so often brought to our minds in the readings for Advent, is suddenly and startlingly not the barren and terrible desolation it seemed that first Good Friday, no, it is ‘golden” and fruitful.

This type of waiting is described by Mother Carys in a way which penetrates to the heart of Advent:

This is a kind of waiting that does not rush us towards an end, or offer us a short cut, it is not a kind of waiting that will focus on what will come at its end. It is a crafted kind of waiting; a season of responding, attentive surrender and rootedness …

If we wait for what we expect we may, if we are fortunate, get it, but then what we may expect from God is bounded by our human frailties and limitations. Better for us to wait in humility, love and prayer, responding to the love we saw in The Coming and knowing two things only, that God loves us, and that what we will get at the end of it is beyond any imaginings or hopes of ours. As Eliot puts it:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

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Blindness in the early afternoon

05 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by John Charmley in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Faith

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Charles king and martyr, Little Gidding, Palm Sunday, TS Eliot

 

DSC02163

In Little Gidding, Eliot describes the way in which the “brief sun flames the ice, on ponds 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.” The season is “midwinter spring,” one well-known to Englishmen and women, where time is suspended “between pole and tropic.” But the poet is also referring to something else with which we are all familiar – that spiritual lukewarmness from which many of us suffer

Yesterday we considered our deafness to God; today I want to consider our blindness. In this time of trial how many of us have our eyes focussed on the news, and on each other? There is, at least to me, something shocking in the rush so many make to judgment. From the policeman telling people sitting in the park that they cannot do so, to those people themselves, congregating in numbers which rightly give cause for concern, from the person doing his or her best to comply with regulations thinly sketched, to those twitching their curtains and reporting their neighbours for going out “uneccessarily.” The cry to close down open spaces is easily made by thosen notn occupying small apartments with young children. All around we can see a rush to judgment.

We are not told that God is mercy or judgment, we are told that He is “love.”  Indeed, St Johngoes as far as saying that the identifying feature of the Christian is the love we have for each other. This is sometimes interpreted as meaning that Christians have love for other Christians, but frankly, even if one accepts this narrower definition, we have to ask how many of us would be found guilty if such love were a crime; would there be enough evidence against us? There would if it were a matter of our rush to judgement; there would if it were a mater of preferring our own view to those of others; there would if it were a matter of virtue-signalling (at least in our own judgement of virtue. Yet, as Eliot reminds us, the “heart’s heat” is “windless cold.” It is that “glare” which blinds us.

We see not through agape, that love God has for all His creation, but through our own eyes. Little Gidding was where the proud Stuart, King Charles I, fled after his defeat at Naseby by the Puritans. It was, for him, a moment of humiliation to which a mixture of stubborn pride and principal had brought him. It was significant that he retreated to the religious community at Little Gidding.

Often accused of being a closet Romanist (enough to endear him to some of us), Charles I was an avowed Arminian, that is he supported those within the Church of England who emphasised continuity with its Catholic past, exemplified in particular by the episcopate. Had Charles been willing to compromise on this point, he might have saved his own life. That he did not do so is one reason why the Church of England recognises him as a Saint and Martyr. Like so many saints and martyrs, his career was one marred by sin, not least the sin of pride; but at his end, he died for something greater than himself. At the last, his blindess was lifted.

It took a greater trial than most of us have to bear to open King Charles’ eyes, but a crisis is an opportunity to turn our eyes toward God. On this, strangest of Palm Sundays, let us ponder what acts of love we might perform which would mark us as God’s. We know from the history of Christianity that it has often been the Christian response to such crises which has, indeed, convinced many of the truth that God is love. Can we, in our time, imitate what our forebears did?

 

 

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