I took an accidental leave of absence from writing. Well, technically from blogging I suppose, I was still writing occasionally, in stunted starts and stops. At any rate, here’s a gentle return, which I hope will be one of many more to share in the coming year. As always, the few of you who have taken the time to read what I share, I am grateful for you, and I hope you find something here that is good, true, and beautiful.
Every year I re-read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Despite 80 years since its publishing, his words seem to fit every new year. He captured timeless truths about the human experience that lend themselves well to consideration every new year. Eliot puts into words many familiar things that become more stark as the year begins again: death, disappointment, time, faith, and hope.
Eliot took six years to write Four Quartets, he was 54 when he finished. It is rightly considered his magnum opus. It is a culmination of his greatest thoughts, relayed beautifully thanks to his great linguistic knowledge and poetic mastery. Eliot’s works, particularly following The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, tend to highlight humility, but I find his Four Quartets to be the greatest example of this, it is at the very heart of this work:
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
(East Coker, Stanza II)
Through his ruminations on time and human frailty, the inevitability of death, and the fallibility of human systems, Eliot seems to urge us toward greater humility, and only by this humility can we grasp the hope that is beyond human achievement, a hope that can come through God alone.
In his final quartet, Little Gidding, he gives us the insight of his 54 years.
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; 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.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
It reads a bit like Ecclesiastes, doesn’t it? Regrets, recognition of impotence, folly, shame, and the sting of well-intended harm. And yet, that final line is so wonderfully hope-filled. It is this humility and forward looking reliance that so resonates with me. That backward looking mourning of our own pride and hubris, that forward looking joy centrally focused on Christ, the one Eliot elsewhere calls the Healer, the Bread, Fire, and Love.
This is the wisdom Eliot discovered in the latter half of his life, the humility that recognizes hope lies not within ourselves, not in human systems, but in Christ.
Eliot does not expound on his comment of our proclivity for “shadow fruit”, but it is a compelling thought. This idea that we are drawn to lesser fruits. Not the fruit of the Spirit that is cultivated through Christ, but the “shadow fruit” of self-reliance, self-righteousness, self-justification. These shadow fruits are indeed bitter to taste. But the fruit grown by the Holy Spirit’s work in us, those fruits that cultivate holiness, goodness, truth, and beauty by the Maker and Perfecter of our faith, are lasting and sweet. Only by these can we be kept from those ill-done things, and those well-intended works that lead to others’ harm. The fruit of the Spirit are the only kind that help us engage in right action.
So as I begin another year, and meditate on Eliot’s words, I consider the humbling list of my own impotence, and so many well-intended mistakes. I find much there to repent of. But I also look back on the work of the Refiner, and all the good he has done despite me. All the unexpected blessing, all of the sharp, yet kind, correction and redirection, the discipline and loving and careful sustaining grace that he used to continue to work my good and help kill my willful self-determination and selfishness. And that’s why I love to look back, because I can look back and see much that is shameful, but then I get to look and say, “see what my God has done!” Like David I can say:
I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart;
I will recount your wonderful deeds
I will be glad and exult in you;
I will sing praise to your name, O Most High.
(Psalm 9:1-3)
I can give thanks because despite my waywardness and misguided attempts at good, God has made goodness abound. Despite my selfishness and wicked tendency to ignore God or try to move him from his rightful place as Lord of my heart, he continually corrects me and draws me closer to himself. Despite all my shameful thoughts and hurtful actions, he has covered me in his bleeding hands and taken my shame as his own. What a glorious reality.
Oceans Never Fill 