Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Lent, lenten journey, pilgrimage, poetry, the wasteland, TS Eliot
I’ve just been listening to a mesmerizing reading of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland by Eileen Atkins and Jeremy Irons on BBC Radio 4. The link to it on the website is here where you can listen again. If you can, read it this Lent (click here)
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
I found this fantastic picture on facebook. I must admit to a great debt to Eliot. One day perhaps I’ll write something of the great influence Four Quartets has had on the ministry of this parish priest.
Part I of TS Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday. Have a good and holy Lent.
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice
And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
Radio 4′s excellent Adventures in Poetry discusses TS Eliot’s Journey of the Magi here.
It’s a very good programme which has added to my appreciation of the poem. I have not read it since I walked the Camino and am now pondering it in the light of that experience.
You can listen to Eliot read it and read the poem here.
The question I am asked the most often at the moment is whether I have adjusted to being home. I think I am. Fortunately I still have a few more weeks of Sabbatical so I can take it gently. I’m doing some reflecting and writing about the future of ministry in Anglican parishes on housing estates, but I’ve also got time to reflect on the Pilgrimage. I managed a long cycle ride to and from a conference at Cropthorne in Worcestershire last week (although my body remembered on the way home that I hadn’t been on a bike for a couple of months). I’m spending time looking at my photos and the stamps in my Pilgrim’s Record; I’m re-reading my journal and Walter Starkie’s The Road to Santiago. I’m starting to prepare a talk which I’ll give at St Bede’s and the Deaf Church (and elsewhere if invited) in January, and I’ve been asked to write an article on it for the Fairacres Chronicle, so there is much prayerful reflection being done and much more to do. I am relaxed about it, but I also know that God has given me a great deal through the Camino that I want to discover and share.
The Pilgrimage was both extremely good and extremely hard. It has made me realize how much I appreciate home and my life and work here (and sleeping in the same bed each night!). While I was walking, I could not imagine wanting to do it again. Now I have finished, I miss it like anything. Meenakshi, my daughter, wants to walk it, so we are beginning to plan walking the Camino Ingles, which is 110km from Ferrol to Santiago, probably in 2011. That gives us a great focus for planning and training and dreaming.
One of the battered poetry books I often carry with me when I walk in this country is TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. Here are the final lines from Little Gidding, which give such a wealth for reflecting on and speak, to me at least, of Pilgrimage and coming home.
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.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
