"In my end is my beginning..."

In 1995, on a sunny spring day in England, I had a meeting with the bursar of Magdalen College at Cambridge University. At one point he asked me if I would like to see the Pepys Library. Samuel Pepys was perhaps the most famous diarist in English literature, having served as a senior official for two kings in the 17th century. In his will, Pepys gave his library to his alma mater, with the proviso that if even one book were lost from it, the entire library would be transferred to King's College. In almost 300 years, no book has ever been lost.

Knowing that I admired the poetry of T. S. Eliot, the bursar remarked that the original manuscript of Eliot's "Four Quartets" was in the Pepys Library. Eliot had spent several summers at Magdalen and had given some of his papers to the college. And so it was that I got to hold in my hands a surprisingly small number of yellow legal pad sheets on which the man thought by many to be the greatest poet in English in the 20th century had written what I regarded as the greatest poem of that century. Eliot's small, delicate handwriting was very precise, and I was struck by how few revisions there were -- really only a few words crossed out here and there.

Books have been written about "Four Quartets", and I'm not a literary scholar. But I had always loved this poem's exquisite, honest and yet stormy writing as it lies across the pages -- a darkly piercing and yet somehow illuminated exploration of time, history and the individual's ability to savor and then override the deep specific pull that the earth exerts on us. Eliot knew that life is a succession of conscious moments, in which inchoate faith meets hard mortality and then passes directly through it, as if it were nothing. The poem drives toward a complete revelation, an understanding that transcends the modern, post-traditional period of which Eliot was a progenitor -- an understanding which nevertheless remained rooted in the language and ideas of that tradition, so that what is old becomes what is new. But there is no revelation. There is no neatly wrapped ultimate meaning. We take the journey with him, yet when we get to the shore and step on the dock, the ship has sailed. But we sailed with it.

Here are passages from "Four Quartets":

To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered...

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or 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...

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness...

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices...

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern...

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.

A poem by Czeslaw Milosz

ON PRAYER

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word is
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, everyone, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

- from The Collected Poems 1931-1987, The Ecco Press, 1988.

The People's Mind and the Entrance of Light

Here is, essentially, the text of a sermon I gave in a Congregational Church in Massachusetts in September 2007:

About a month ago I happened to be reading an essay entitled “The People’s Idea of God,” which was originally a lecture in Boston in 1886, by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Here’s one passage:

“Proportionately as the people's belief of God, in every age, has been dematerialized…has their Deity become good; no longer a personal tyrant or a molten image, but the divine Life, Truth, and Love …This more perfect idea, held constantly before the people's mind, must have a benign and elevating influence upon the character of nations as well as individuals, and will lift man ultimately to the understanding that our ideals form our characters, that as a man ‘thinketh in his heart, so is he’."

The conviction that our ideas and thoughts produce our experience was shared by the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said in a lecture in Boston in 1842: “All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought…You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstances. Let any thought or motive of mine be different from what they are, the difference will transform my condition and economy.”

Mr. Emerson and Mrs. Eddy were characteristic children of 19th century New England, raised in its bracing Protestant individualism but eager for a new age marked by science and emancipation. They were also contemporaries of Abraham Lincoln, and if anyone was an example of someone who made his own circumstances out of his thinking, it was Lincoln.

Mrs. Eddy’s words -- “this more perfect idea, held constantly before the people's mind, must have a benign and elevating influence upon the character of nations” -- could be a description of how Lincoln taught a new definition of America’s purpose to those who had to fight and redeem meaning from the ordeal of the Civil War. They also echo the opening words of the U.S. Constitution: “We, the people…in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice …and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution…”

The founders didn’t only write the Constitution, they ordained it, as if the document were to be a kind of civic ministry. Clearly they regarded the advent of America’s freedom not only as a political deed but as a providential sign, implying a higher calling than merely building a prosperous nation – an idea later reflected in Lincoln’s speeches as president. According to Lincoln’s law partner, “No man had a stronger or firmer faith in Providence.” Lincoln himself said that he believed in a “Creator” who possessed all wisdom and who had “established a principle, in obedience to which, worlds move and are upheld.”

This idea of God was more celestial than evangelical, explaining perhaps why Lincoln usually avoided discussing religion – he would never have satisfied someone who worshiped a punishing Jehovah or a body hanging on a cross. But as a boy, Lincoln for a long time had only two things to read: the works of Shakespeare, and the Bible, which he knew as well or better than his contemporaries. He wrote with the inflections of its language and knew all of its best stories. And that made him far better able to speak to the people’s mind than if he kept reminding audiences of how religious he was, which many of today’s politicians can’t stop doing.

In December 1864, two wives of Confederate prisoners of war went to the White House to ask Lincoln to release their husbands. One of the ladies emphasized that her husband was a religious man. “Tell him, when you meet him,” Lincoln replied, “that the religion that sets men to rebel and fight against their government, because, as they think, that government does not sufficiently help some men to eat their bread on the sweat of other men’s faces, is not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven.”

The classicist Edith Hamilton would have instantly recognized in that remark the passion of the prophet Ezekiel. In her book, Spokesmen for God: The Great Teachers of the Old Testament, she tells us that Ezekiel saw that “the consciousness of being set above others, because one has blue blood or a white skin or the correct method of preparing food or the unique knowledge of the truth, is the great disrupting force.” When brandishing religion takes the place of humbly seeking truth, our ideals will not so easily elevate our characters.

“The Hebrew prophets,” Hamilton said, “were men possessed by the idea that what ought to be can and must be brought to pass. Their only aim was to establish on earth the rule of justice and mercy… Religion’s work was to create a world where no one was oppressed.” She could as easily have said this about Abraham Lincoln or any of the leaders of the great nonviolent movements of the 20th century which obtained their peoples’ rights.

The history of those movements demonstrates that oppression’s days are numbered once the people begin to resist; and when they disrupt its power to make people afraid, it collapses. But the knowledge of how to do this has not become intuitive, because the world still believes that material power, especially violence, is immovable. So the knowledge must be taught.

This is what Jesus did, incessantly. When Mary Magdalene and Joanna came to the tomb, found the great stone moved away, and realized Jesus had risen, one of the two men standing there in shining garments said to Mary, “Remember how he spoke to you when he was still in Galilee.” In other words: don’t be astonished; think about what this means.

Later when two of his followers are walking on the road to Emmaus, talking about the amazing news of resurrection, a stranger starts walking with them and “expounds” to them the reasons why it happened. After they finally recognize the stranger as Jesus, and he disappears, they run back to Jerusalem to tell their friends, and one says, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us, while he opened to us the scriptures?” And later, when Jesus stood in the midst of them in Jerusalem, the gospel simply says, “Then he opened their understanding.”

The only outward thing happening in these ecstatic encounters is speaking and listening. Why should it be otherwise, when the writer of John begins his gospel by saying, “In the beginning was the Word”? No one hyperventilated, sacrificed a goat, or excommunicated others who hadn’t joined the gathering. What happened was illumination, and then the rest of all their lives changed utterly. But there was more light to come, from this opening of understanding.

Between 1450 and 1605, three events occurred which made possible the ideas that fired the American founding. In 1450, Johannes Gutenburg invented movable type, making books available for a mass market. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of Wittenburg Castle church and began the Protestant Reformation, assailing a remote authoritarian Roman church. And in 1605, Sir Francis Bacon published The Advancement of Learning, which offered the first definition of the modern idea of science.

Without the Bible printed in vernacular languages, Luther would not so easily have reached an immense following. After the Reformation, Protestants based their ministry on the consent of believers, and believers were seen as equal before God – from which the ideas of self-government and universal rights naturally evolved.

The sociologist Adam Seligman tells us that this “new vision of the individual as a moral and autonomous agent” made possible the idea of a civil society in which reason rather than coercion was the basis of public thought. This in turn made possible the idea of the scientist, who gives himself authority to propound new theories based on his investigation of fact.

With reason, Francis Bacon argued, human inquiry would open nature’s secrets and free the world from dogmatism and what he called “animal time.” It was necessary to “stand upon the hill of Truth,” he said, above the “errors and wanderings and mists” of customary thought, before “another universe or theatre of things comes into view.”

That “new theatre”, to the followers of Gandhi in India, of Solidarity in Poland, of the people power revolution in the Philippines, of Vaclev Havel’s Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and of Yushchenko’s Orange Revolution in Ukraine – among other great movements of liberation -- was a political order which enforced equal rights for all, and in which power rested on the consent of the people, ascertained in free and fair elections.
Vaclev Havel said that such revolutions always begin with individuals who choose to stop believing the lie that life is normal when people’s rights are denied, and instead to begin to “live in the truth.” That would mean nothing unless thought was translated into action – unless the truth was demonstrated. Through skillful resistance to external control by fear and dogmatism, a people whose mind had grasped the truth about the real source of power could begin the work of liberating themselves. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” I don’t have to tell you who said that.

Sir Francis Bacon, said the anthropologist Loren Eiseley, “had one burning passion: to change the world through thought.” So did Ezekiel, Emerson, and Lincoln – and many other thinkers and emancipators to whom we owe the advent of a free and self-renovating global society. Notice that I say “advent” – meaning, this liberated world society is coming, but it’s not here yet. And there are threats to its birth that remain to be vanquished.

One of those threats is the idea that a new order can be brought about by bringing death to people who object to the terms of that order. That’s what terrorism is really about. The writer Jonathan Schell said that Jesus’s observation, “They that live by the sword shall die by the sword,” does more “than prescribe conduct; it makes a claim about the nature of the human world. We cannot suppose Jesus means that everyone who kills will be killed. But we can suppose he means that violence harms the doer as well as his victims; that violence generates counter-violence; and that the choice of violence starts a chain of events likely to bring general ruin.”

The novelist and political writer Arthur Koestler wrote a novel in 1940 about the violence of Stalinism. He had been a communist who renounced his political faith after witnessing the ruin it had created. The book was called Darkness at Noon. If we believe, in any extremity, that we are limited to material power to protect us or make us free, then we are living in what Francis Bacon called “animal time.” In a house that you enter at night, darkness flees when you turn on the light. But you must turn it on.

That is what the writer of the New Testament book of First John had in mind when he wrote to his followers in the first century. He had been a follower of Jesus and an eyewitness to his healings and other so-called miracles. And here is what John said:

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life: For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness… This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you: God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”
References:

- Mary Baker Eddy, The People’s Idea of God, Christian Science Publishing Society, 1908.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in The Essential Transcendentalists, ed.by Richard G. Geldard, New York, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005

- Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1999

- “Reply to a Southern Woman,” Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1959-1865, New York, The Library of America, 1989

- Edith Hamilton, Spokesmen for God: The Great Teachers of the Old Testament, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1962.

- Adam B. Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society, Princeton University Press, 1992

- Loren Eiseley, The Man Who Saw Through Time, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973

- Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World, New York, Henry Holt and Company

- The First Epistle of John, Chapter 1, verses 1-2, 5.