"(Bless me father)"

Every year I return to Eliot’s  poem, because it was my first introduction to the idea of "Ash Wednesday"  The first I remember, anyway.  As I said last year:

This was Eliot publicly turning to Christianity.  Back to Christianity?  Most likely.  I don't know that he was ever that public an atheist.  He was turning to the establishment church, too, as he joined the Church of England at about this time, a church that, liturgically, is more or less properly called "Catholic lite."  So the language here may seem distinctly Catholic, to non-Catholics like me, anyway.  But it is also distinctly Anglican.

This was my first encounter, in high school where I first read Eliot, with the idea of Ash Wednesday.  Needless to say this poem was not terribly enlightening on the liturgical calendar for this observance.  But I return to it every year because it challenges me to understand, much in the same way I try to understand my relationship to God, and to everyone else.  I don't mean because I am so far removed from people, or even in some teen-angst sense from myself.  But every year I start over, "Because I do not hope to turn/Because I do not hope/Because I do not hope to turn again/[Still] Desiring this man's gift or that man's scope."  I tell myself I no longer strive to strive toward such things; but my self knows better than I.

Is that odd? 

I was going to (finally!) explicate the poem today. Maybe I will.  Maybe I'll even connect "Burnt Norton" and The Four Quartets" to Xmas and Advent, now that Lent has begun.  My penance for never finishing what I started.

Maybe.  But right now, I just want to leave you with this, which maybe has nothing to do with Eliot at all.  Or maybe I can connect nothing with nothing.

Maybe.

But then, how is that different from most of us?

ASHES, ashes, all fall down. How could I have forgotten? Didn't I see the heavens wiped shut just yesterday, on the road walking? Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisome days? The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the mill-stones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other-for the world and all the products of extension-is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.

--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, HarperCollins, 1977.

IN some monastic communities, monks go up to receive the ashes barefoot. Going barefoot is a joyous thing. It is good to feel the floor or the earth under your feet. It is good when the whole church is silent, filled with the hush of people walking without shoes. One wonders why we wear such things as shoes anyway. Prayer is so much more meaningful without them. It would be good to take them off in church all the time. But perhaps this might appear quixotic to those who have forgotten such very elementary satisfactions. Someone might catch cold at the mere thought of it.

--Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration  

I can't see Dillard and Merton ever getting along; but maybe they would surprise me.  Dillard's despair is as firm and real as Merton's faith and confidence.  Two sides of the same coin?  No.  Two feet on the same path.

I am an older man than I was when I first encountered Dillard's words (long before I read any of Merton's),  Couldn't have been earlier than 77.  I was a feckless ignorant child of 21 when that year began; 22 and married and wholly unprepared for adulthood by the time the year turned to '78.  I didn't understand what she meant then; lord, do I understand now.  And I understand it is only for understanding, not for explication. Sometimes analysis is increase and insight; but sometimes it is decrease, and willful blindness.  Sometimes you just need to leave it at the realm of spirit bare, of longing and grief everlasting, and let that be reality for even a moment. It is good to have a day, ritually, for that.