Hope in the Waste Land

Today I find myself unable to get the cogitative cogs working. The mechanism of the mind is rather bogged down in the morass of malaise, despite a good ham sandwich, wholegrain cereal with maple syrup and pecans, and strong coffee. And so I turn to T. S. Eliot.

Thomas Stearns Eliot will always be remembered for his long and symbol-laden exegesis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, The Waste Land. But despite his many entropic writings and the sense of ruin, of disorder, and general hand-wringing at the state of the cosmos that many readers sense, he was also capable of steely hope and vigorous faith.

In his Choruses from 'The Rock', Eliot crafted many memorable lines about faith in the urban wasteland, the wasteland of human aspirations and dry communities. It is to these lines I turn when the world seems too burdensome. Have a taste:

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

The lot of man is ceaseless labor,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know
That it is hard to be really useful, resigning
The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.

The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

Against the night-blindness of the daily Christian, the world-weariness and the stench of stupidity, there are few defences. For we who believe, the ultimate bulwark is the complex and sometimes unyielding mass of the Scriptures. But occasionally, a poet sheds light into the Waste Land; occasionally a watchman peers alertly into the gloom.

Today I find myself inspired to think and to write, and to do it this time in memory of yet another of those guardians of the waste, the late William Fitzjames Oldham, who was with us from 17 December 1854 to 27 March 1937, before he walked joyfully into that good light.

A Roman Devotional

Sometimes, one is driven by the exigencies of service to speak about things that come abruptly to one's sparsely prepared mind. The response is difficult, the pressure is dire, the words seem too small to convey and contain what is too large. And thus it came to me while in the shower today, that the Romans have a lot to answer for, and have a lot of answers for which there are no questions.

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Here is the Roman meditation that I am about to say something about. It comes from the letter to the Romans, chapter 12, verses 1-6a.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgement, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given us.

What is clear is that we are all gifted. And the tragedy on display is that this is masked, defeated, debilitated. By conforming to the statistical, logical, socially-constructed patterns of this world, we ensure that the laws of 'normal distribution' require us to describe each one of us as 'above the mean', 'below the mean' or 'within n standard deviations of the mean' – as if these mean something. The truth is simple: we are multifactorial, talented in a myriad ways. To put ourselves into any of the world's reific and disintegrative ways is to deny an holistic truth and to make atoms out of whole people. It is the Bertrand Russell way, but it is not the way of God.

For we are all, once we subject ourselves to sober judgement, gifted to an exact degree which only God knows – but the assurance of faith is that we ARE gifted. In fact, we are gifted so much that we need not think of ourselves too highly, or too lowly; to do either would be to spurn the gracious power that has been given to us for a lie of our own device. We must renew our minds, banish all thoughts of numerical ratings, and be transformed.

At this point, everyone will rise up and condemn what seems to be my misplaced idealism. Well, I don't think that God calls for a lower standard, and I am not saying that. I believe that numerical ratings cannot capture the excellence that comes with being your best. It is not possible that your best is worse than any grade the world can give you. If you are an IB student capable (as far as God knows) of scoring 44 points at best, then 44 points is honourable, distinguished, powerful; the same goes if your God-given limit is 34, though – then 34 would be excellent. With this reasoning, I hold all my students to a higher standard than I can possibly demand on my own: can you be the best that you can be? Can you see yourself as being licensed to touch the face of God and be a finger of His hand in this world?

But how would we know what our best is? There are two things to ponder. The eagle is a symbol of Roman might; the prophet Isaiah also used it in his inspirational message: "You will soar on wings like eagles." Note: you will not soar on eagles' wings, but on wings like eagles. It is the difference between the numerical grades of this world (mere wings) and the excellence of God (something like wings, but better). It is only on the wings of the spirit and of the Spirit, that you can reach above the surly bonds of earth. You were all made for better things; the best is yet to be. You were all made gifted and talented; why should you despise yourself? And lastly, there is nothing normal about your distribution.

Forget the patterns of this world. Transcend them. Think of the box, because you are constrained to; think beyond the box into the vault of the heavens, because you are more than atoms. You are what you are, and that is no mean thing at all.

St David's Day (2008)

Today is St David's Day again. The last time I wrote about it, I wondered about the prophetic power of verse. Today I shall write about what I heard today, and did not hear.

I cannot imagine that St David was a neglectful shepherd. I do not think he would have left his sheep in the rain and damp. I cannot believe that he would have taken them to task for being sheep, nor make them to be as "huddled masses yearning to breathe free". I cannot imagine him to have been a dark and violent figure, booming imprecations at the innocent. I do not think that these are limitations imposed by my lack of imagination; rather, these are logical limitations imposed, one way or another, by what little we know of him.

In fact, I look at what he said in his last moments. "Do the little things in life," he said. It makes me humble and focussed on my task. I am no administrator, no lord or baron, no assassin or mercenary, no blood-stained man of the sword. If I ever have been, it was a false role. I am no shepherd either, but I must hold true to that which is my gift. My gift is all about little things done well, and the small made greater.

For there are none of us who are 'gifted' except by the humanist pattern of this world – and yet we are all gifted with the powers of the Spirit that is within us. God grants each person something unique that is that person's own self, and He also gifts us with what we do not deserve, something rare and useful in a specific and special way. So for all that, we must be humble and do the little things. If our gifts should be made glorious by what they have helped to build, so be it. He who bestowed those gifts shall be glorified, while the flesh which is as grass will find its rightful end.

David of Glyn Rhosyn, be our inspiration this day, for as long as the first day of March be a remembrance of you. For the departed saints, often forgotten in the fires of this world, are given to us as encouragement. And we thank God for them all.

A Personal Anthem

Over the years, I've accumulated a lot of songs that play in my head at the oddest of times. Some are sacred, some get my blood pumping, some of them act as a source of irony in dark times, some of them give me the kind of strength that ignores coercion and the abuse of power.

Tonight I heard one of my old favourites, a song which reminds me of my days as a reckless young man with much to play for and little to lose (well, that's what I thought then, in the ignorance of youth). The song is David Foster's St Elmo's Fire, performed by John Parr. The words go like this:

St Elmo's Fire (Man In Motion)

Growin' up, you don't see the writing on the wall
Passin' by, movin' straight ahead, you knew it all
But maybe sometime if you feel the pain
You'll find you're all alone, everything has changed
Play the game, you know you can't quit until it's won
Soldier on, only you can do what must be done
You know in some way you're a lot like me
You're just a prisoner and you're tryin' to break free

I can see a new horizon underneath the blazin' sky
I'll be where the eagle's flying higher and higher
Gonna be your man in motion, all I need is a pair of wheels
Take me where my future's lyin', St. Elmo's Fire...

Burning up, don't know just how far that I can go (just how far I go)
Soon be home, only just a few miles down the road
I can make it, I know I can
You broke the boy in me, but you won't break the man

I can see a new horizon underneath the blazin' sky
I'll be where the eagle's flying higher and higher
Gonna be your man in motion, all I need is a pair of wheels
Take me where my future's lyin', St. Elmo's Fire...

I can climb the highest mountain, cross the wildest sea
I can feel St. Elmo's Fire burnin' in me, burnin' in me

Just once in his life a man has his time
and my time is now, I'm coming alive

I can hear the music playin', I can see the banners fly
Feel like you're back again, and hope ridin' high
Gonna be your man in motion, all I need is a pair of wheels
Take me where my future's lyin', St. Elmo's Fire

I can see a new horizon underneath the blazin' sky
I'll be where the eagle's flying higher and higher
Gonna be your man in motion, all I need is a pair of wheels
Take me where my future's lyin', St. Elmo's Fire

I can climb the highest mountain, cross the wildest sea
I can feel St. Elmo's Fire burnin' in me
Burnin', burnin' in me, I can feel it burnin'
Oooh, burnin' inside of me...

1985

You can see how that kind of song might make a young man feel great about life. But now, looking at where I am and what I do, I can't help but feel a certain nagging irony. St Elmo's Fire, that phosphorescent lightning found on ships at sea, is now just a faintly glowing cavalcade of odd fires in random directions to me.

The problem that I see is one of creeping irony. This comes from the combination of an active sense of humour, a working environment in which things sometimes do cock up but everything is made to look great, and a reasonably intelligent mind able to put many things together into a whole and fairly accurate picture. After a while, everything inspiring sounds vaguely ironic. It's worse when people distort the sacred and powerful for purposes of expedience: I remember posting about such distortion here.

One Of A Kind

I was at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle once, atoning quietly for my sins. The sunlight streamed in on the ancient flags and the modern tourists. In one sweep, you saw the valour and the grime, the tawdry and the excellent, the British humour and the English comedy. I have always loved chapel services. They bring out solemnity and grace, together with moments of (un)intended irony, just as one imagines daily life by the Sea of Galilee might have done in Jesus' time.

Recently, a friend of mine posted this poem by Stephen Spender. It was running through my mind in all its poignant majesty during chapel service this morning. Here you go.

I think continually of those who were truly great
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasures in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the Spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.