FOUR QUARTETS::::#1

There are fireworks pounding off outside. I'm a scrooge when it comes to these things though.

Bah.
Humbug.

I'm also at work. I must admit it's impressive feeling the shockwaves through the walls though. My coworker just left for Ashton, the dorm on the hill, for a better view. Such is the weakness of man.

The book I'm currently reading is "Four Quartets" by T.S. Eliot. It's poetry. Dense poetry. I've attempted to read it about three times before, and the last time I made it all the way through; but came out on the other end none the wiser. This time, I'm getting a little more out of it. A little.

I wouldn't normally bother, but T.S. Eliot is just about the most highly recommended poet of the last century, and I've heard "Four Quartets" is a christian work of sorts.

It's divided into four sections ('quartets'): Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding.

Burnt Norton still eludes me. East Coker I belueve to be about the vanity of things under the sun and about the lives that pass into and out of it. It begins:
"In my beginning is my end..." - and goes on to paint an evening pagan flavor (fertility, dancing, death) on the way all living things are made of the previously dead "Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,//old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth//Which is already flesh, fur and faeces...". It made me think of the part in 1 Cor. where Paul says, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive." - in our beginning, is our end. "Flesh gives birth to flesh, and Spirit gives birth to Spirit." Insofar as our beginning is dirt, that's where we'll end up. Insofar as we're "Born from above", we'll end up in the image of the Man from Heaven.


East Coker develops until he begins talking about the nature of death, and how it's only at death that we're freed from the 'distempered part': Our only health is the disease...to be restored, our sickness must grow worse"
it ends:

"Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

So, he ends with the reversal of the first line, but this time with a different meaning - that in death we've finally begun. I could take this as "If anyone loses his life for my sake and the gospels he will find it" or "To be absent with the body is to be present with the Lord." I'm pretty sure Eliot means something like the latter, especially with all his talk of mortality and dying.


In between the beginning and the end were some choice verses, my favorites below:

"That was a way of putting it - not very satifactory:
a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter
It was not (to start again) what one had expected."

(reminds me of Francis Schaeffer's critique of the state of things, where people aren't sure they're really communicating, and listen to "the poet" simply in a vague
mystical hope that some meaning will break through. Francis would say that the Christian doesn't-or shouldn't-have that problem, since we know that God made language, and that we can truly-though not exhaustively-know our fellow men, since they are what we are: men made in the image of God, and communicators, as God is a communicator.)

"At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been"

Which I take to be a critique of the statistical way we look at everything, using the past's statistics to decide what we'll expect from the future, which leaves us open to the surprise (or shock) of the new.



"Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless"

(Stock Socrates stuff, but sound.)



"In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not."

(In other words: "Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.")



"So here I am...having had twenty years-
...Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Becuase one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it..."

(More of the difficulty of communication. It helps if you only have one thing to say :-))


So, that's where I'm at so far.

I am now 28, and I have just finished Atlas Shrugged.

The following is fiction to illustrate a true principle:
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I stretched out on the thin ledge, gripping what chunks of rock I could to hold on in the rising wind. My friend with me grinned idiotically into the distance as I looked over the edge and winced - a sheer drop of about a quarter mile, and jagged basalt at the bottom.
Hey, don't worry, we've got rope! he chuckled with good humor, and proceeded to unwind a forty foot length of 10mm climbing rope and looked up with an ecstatic grin at the cliff edge some thirty feet above us.
"What are you going to do with that?" I asked. "Oh, he said, it's rope, you know. As long as you've got rope you're all right." He started flailing one end of it upwards, and after about five tries he got one end of it to lay at the top, maybe it was sunk in the snow up there, I had no way of knowing, I was just impressed he'd gotten one end of it to stay up there.
"Great", I said, "now what?"
"Well, as long as we've got rope we're unstoppable!" he said. "I'm going up!"
and with that, before I could process what was happening or stop him, he leaped up holding the rope with a shout of "Rope will carry me through this!" the end of the rope at the top flipped back off and went sailing down at terminal velocity with my friend to the meat-grinding plateau below us. I grabbed uselessly at the rope as it passed but it was about four feet out from the ledge as it fell. I almost fell myself in the process, yelled something I probably shouldn't have and scrabbled at the rock with my bleeding fingertips until I got what I was sure was a firm grip. The last I saw of my friend in one piece was his confused face plummeting down, I could read his lips:"but..I had rope!"
Hours later, still clinging like a limpet to the ledge, I heard some shuffling from up over my head, and when I looked at the cliff summit, I saw through the misty air a face peering down at me, It looked friendly from what little I could see of it, it was starting to get dark.
"What are you doing down there?" - so I wasn't hallucinating, I thought. "I'm trying not to fall!" I said.
"So I see. would you like to get up here? There's far less chance of falling then."
"Yes! Of course I would - please help me!"
Okay", he said, and threw down a length of rope. With a sense of relief I saw it dangle in front of me and I grabbed on, then remembered my friend, now dead. "Wait! I said, my friend threw some rope up there and it didn't work, he fell!"
"Well, the man said, what did he have it tied on to up here?"
"Tied?" I asked, "Nothing I guess...He just threw it up there!"
"What?!?" He almost shouted. "That poor fool! Didn't he know a rope's only as good as what's on the other end? And he had NOTHING on the other end??? Where did he expect it to take him?"
"He's dead now", I said angrily.
"Well, nothing else could have been the result with that method", he said sadly. "But this rope here's tied to a stone that's part of this mountain, it's not going anywhere, and I'll pull you up as soon as you tie yourself on!"
Well, I thought, that's all well and good, but I can't see that stone, how am I supposed to know that it's there? Just take your word on it?
I said as much, and He raised his eyebrows, knelt down and took hold of the rope, and with a swift jump and twist he rappelled down to where I was, smiled at me, and climbed hand over hand as fast as a spider back to the top.
"Now, are you ready?" He gave the rope a shake from the top and the end wiggled in my face.
"All right", I said, "I am"! And tied myself on.
In another fifteen seconds I was at the top, safe, and headed in his truck to the town he had built at the summit.
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All this to say:
1. Hope - it's not supposed to be a buzzword, no word is. It's supposed to mean something. Just like rope isn't a standalone, a word is not meant to be just a cheerleading noise.

2. Hope, in order to have a meaning, must be directed towards something, just as rope has to be tied to something to be of use.

3. Hope, like the rope, is only as good as what it's attached to on the other end.
Hope in hope will not save anyone from anything except maybe the capability of dealing with reality until it's too late. You need to know what you expect from hope, and what reason you have to expect it.

What do I hope for?
I hope to be fully redeemed from all that's wrong in this world and in me, including the very likely possibility that I will physically die.
I fully expect to be raised physically from the dead to a new kind of indestructible, pure, joyful and everlasting life, and to receive a reward for the things I did in my current body, whether good or bad. I expect this to happen when Jesus Christ returns to renew and rule the earth.

What is my hope attatched to? Jesus Christ and his Word.
Why do I think that it is not just "rope tossed into the air"? -Because Jesus Christ physically rose from the dead about 1,973 years ago, and in Him and through his physical resurrection God proved that my hope is firmly attached to a solid anchor, to a fully attainable goal. Just like in the story the man who threw down the rope climbed down to prove that it would hold, So God in history raised Jesus Christ from the dead so we could examine and see for ourselves through the evidence that history provides that His word is like a steel cable, it will hold.
And a hope like that is worth hanging on to.

Recency


It's snowing here in Washington. As I left for work the flakes had started coming down. The kids caught a glimpse of the shallow white ground cover as I was headed out the door and yelled "It's Christmas!!!, can we open our presents?!?" I told them their education had been neglected and that it wasn't christmas every time it snowed, and Brandy explained that Josiah had asked before "when is christmas?" and she had told him that it was christmas when it snowed, as she hadn't expected to see snow anytime soon. So I smilingly told her she's been miseducating our children and we laughed about it as she had the kids come look out the door at the snow falling as I headed for the car.
We'd watched the first half of "Amelie" before I left, as that was all I had time for. It's very funny so far, and like all french films I've seen it's also very existential.
The definition of existentialism (according to that wonderful cauldron of common knowledge which is wikipedia) is "the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject – not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude," or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world."
At first I would think that existentialism would be totally Christian thinking, but it's really not. There's a huge existential element in christianity, on the personal level: we're addressed by God and Jesus as feeling, acting humans, and God Himself seems to be the same. Overall something very hard to put in a graph or a diagram. But at the same time we're given a stability that pure existentialists don't have, since we have things that never change (The promises of God), and we know some basic answers for basic questions like "Who am I, where did I come from, where am I going" but between all that there's still a huge realm of unknowns that to us seem absurd/meaningless except in the light that they're part of the divine plan somehow.
Speaking of absurdity, I've been feeling somewhat out of touch with reality lately. I think in part because I'm working nights, and haven't gotten out of the house in fully conscious mode in a while. Also I think it's the isolation; as I have no believing friends (the kind of friends I can hang out with I mean, I acquaintances galore, but I miss having friends, and I miss my friends back in MN.) - Except, of course, Brandy, who I am grateful for, but without babysitters our times together have been between the hours of 10pm-3am, not the best time for hanging out. Lord willing we've got some potential babysitters lined up for the near future (some girls from church). Then again, all my ethereal-ness could just be brain chemistry gone awry, in which case this too shall pass soon enough.
Meeting w/ a faculty member from SPU Monday morning, he read my letters to the editor and has a group of people he meets with who want to change the course of SPU in a somewhat more scriptural direction. I pray that goes well, and I pray it's not political.
My role in youth group is interesting... I haven't seen or talked to any of the guys for about three weeks for more than a few seconds, because Sun. grp has been cancelled for the past three weeks (well, one of the weeks there was a guest speaker) and with my kids running underfoot it's impossible to have any real conversation after service. We end up going to the church coffeeshop and sitting down to watch them for half an hour or so til we go home. So my plan of getting to know the guys @ Youth Group has thus far flopped.
On the upside I'm going to be off work for over a week during Christmas Break, that's going to be very nice. We're planning on going down to Centralia to visit w/ the relatives down there. We'll also most likely go up to Nate and Marielle's at some point then too.
Read "The Spiritual Brain"-a book on non-materialistic view of the brain/mind connection which confirmed my earlier theories, but it was written by a neurosurgeon of the Teilhard De Chardin variety. (kinda cosmically new agey). Also read "Napoleon of Notting Hill", which although it has its moments isn't as good as the other Chesterton I've read. Finished Isaiah and am on Jeremiah 11, listened to "Hood" by Stephen Lawhead and am now listening to CH Spurgeon's autobiography on MP3. And reading through A.E. Wilder-Smith's Autobiography as well. Plus, if anyone feels like passing it along to Paul back in St. Cloud, the puritan devotional he gave me had been a constant encouragement.
Well, I think that's it for now.