When King David brought the ark of God up to the shrine he had prepared for it in Jerusalem, we read that the procession was enlivened with songs and dancing. I want to speak to you about David and how to the horror of his young wife and in a blare of strange, wild music the ancient king got the rhythm of God under his skin and danced away himself with all his might and became what he became.

I want to set David dancing before you now, and in your mind’s eye I want you to try to see him dancing way off through the dimness of three thousand years. The music he’s dancing to, if we could hear it, would be an offense to our ears I suppose — the harps and castanets, the tambourines and cymbals — but we can’t hear it, of course. We can only see that he hears it, or hears something through it, beyond it, because it is plain even at the distance of thirty centuries that more than just his body is caught up in more than just the music, his whole being is caught up and he abandons himself to the dancing. That is why his wife, who is the daughter of a king as well as the wife of a king, is so horrified, because the king her husband has forgotten himself. He has forgotten himself and his kingly dignity, and to make matters worse he has done it in the presence of the servants. That is why the queen, who in no sense forgets herself, despises him in her heart.

She wants him to be a king not so much for his sake as for her own sake, so she can be a queen. But instead he becomes a dancer, and his body glistens with the fury and the joy of it, and his bare feet beat the wild rhythms of it into the earth in front of the Holy Ark where Yahweh the King of Glory dwells. David is not interested in being what Michal wants him to be, and when she berates him afterwards he answers her out of the fury that is still upon him with, “I will make myself more contemptible than this and I will be abased in your eyes.” David isn’t primarily interested in the music the musicians are playing. What really interests him, what he is really dancing to, comes out when he says, “I will make merry before the Lord.”

He is not dancing simply to the music that comes from without. He is dancing to the music of his wild gladness that wells up from within him in the presence of the ark. He is dancing his religion. He forgets himself, forgets to be a king, forgets to live up to the image that his wife has of him or his servants have of him. But in forgetting himself, he happens also to become himself.

I don’t know what it’s like to be inside your skin, but I am the world’s leading authority on what it’s like to be inside my skin, so let me generalize from my experience and if it doesn’t match yours there’s no great harm done.

I think that for people like us, it can be hard to forget ourselves and to be ourselves at a dance. And of course it’s especially hard to be yourself if you’re not quite sure who you are. This explains why you and I were uncomfortable at the middle school dances and at the prom. A young person, and to some extent, every person, is a person who is still looking for a self to be. When you are looking for a self to be, the temptation is always very great to be a self that you think other people are going to like.

David had his Queen Michal with her own ideas of what a king should be and at a dance you have someone like her too, the partner you’re dancing with and the friends who are there dancing, and they all have their ideas of the kind of person you should be. So very often that’s the person you try to be. You put on the face you think they will find admissible and dance their way not only because you want their approval and want to be popular with them but because in a real way you need their approval as something to give you security in a world where God knows there is much cause to be insecure, just as they need your approval and are wearing a face to please you.

When I say you I mean me too because to some degree for all of us life is a masked ball. To some degree for all of us life consists of trying on many masks until at last, by God’s grace, we find the one that fits who we really are and it becomes our face so that the whole process turns out to have been a process of self-discovery. But unfortunately it can also be a process of self-concealment and self-deceit and eventual self-loss whereby in our efforts to endear ourselves to each other we wear masks so foreign to our natures that when we meet, we meet not on the basis of who we are but instead we meet solely on the basis of who we want others to think that we are. And when that is true we don’t really meet each other at all.

The sound of a dance, the sound of our society in general, is often the sound not of human beings meeting other human beings, but the sound of masks clattering up against masks. And this is so because just as we were afraid at dances when we were young, we’re afraid still. You’re afraid to open yourself to another’s knowing for fear that in knowing you the other will reject you. You don’t speak your mind truly for fear that you’ll sound like a fool, and beneath that fear is the darker fear that maybe you are a fool. You’re afraid the world will dish out more to you than you are able to take. You’re afraid that someone very important will ask more of you than you feel you have in you to give.

Not all of the truth, thank God, and not all of the time, but part of the truth at least part of the time is that we are afraid of each other, you and I, and afraid of our lives. A sadder truth still is that the way this world works, part of the time our fears are not unwarranted. So it is that the dance we end up going to with our lives is not really a dance after all, but a masquerade.

But Christ calls us to the Dance, as the poet T. S. Eliot called it. At the still point of the turning world / There the Dance is / And there is only the Dance. It is why Saint John’s has been here for 126 years, and why you are here this morning. You believe it. Some Christians do not associate Christ with dancing, but the primitive Christians, Christians of the earliest Christian centuries, in the clumsy art of the catacombs, depicted Christ as Orpheus, the fabulous musician of Greek mythology whose rhythm none could resist, who danced the fawns out of the forest and the fir trees down from the hills. And they had warrant for it, after all, for what else did Jesus say of himself? Speaking of the unresponsiveness of the Jews to his mission, and to that of John the Baptist before him, “You are like children,” he said, “sitting in the street complaining to one another: we have piped to you and you have not danced, we have mourned and you have not lamented.” Mourned, that was John calling to repentance. Piped, that was Jesus dancing them into the kingdom of God with the music of everlasting joy.

A little over a year ago at the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles, there was great merriment and dancing for the wedding reception of Evan and Kristin Ellsworth. What is it that released us — that set us off? Music played by The Cowling Band, one of the best bands in the City of Angels. That is what released us: songs to dance to. But what was it that controlled us? The same thing: we danced to the music. The control is the release. The music held us. The music let us go.

This is why the lyres and cymbals that David dances to in our text and writes about in the Psalms are illuminating parables of true religion. For the whole mystery of Christian faith comes down to a phrase of one of the great collects in the Book of Common Prayer: “whose service is perfect freedom.” God our control and God our release. Listen to what John Milton says of his Lycidas in heaven: “There entertain him all the saints above / in solemn troops and sweet societies / that sing, and singing in their glory move / and wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.”

Let me end where I began, with the young King David dancing. For as long at least as the moment lasted he was not afraid to be himself no matter what the queen might think or the servants or all Israel. The reason he wasn’t afraid to be himself was that he was dancing in the presence of the Most High by whom he found himself not rejected but accepted, not threatened but blessed. David wasn’t afraid to be himself because he found himself in the presence of the King of Glory with whom he felt not fear finally but a gladness and oneness that rose up in him like music. He wasn’t afraid of life because the source of life itself had gotten under his skin, calling forth his true self in all its nakedness, setting it free to be made whole and real.

When you come right down to it, what I stand here in the name of the King of Glory to do is to invite you to join this strange dance, to invite you to listen to the music that Jesus of Nazareth heard who in this sense was indeed the Son of David. In the rhythm and pattern of Jesus’ life you can see what human life was made to be, a life where we meet one another not as strangers of whom we are afraid, but as friends in whom we delight. A life where we meet God not as an unappeasable tyrant but as the leader of the Dance, the Lord in whose service is the freedom to become fully human and fully alive. Amen.

When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other? 
What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together
To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community’?
And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.
O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger,
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
     Calling

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.

_______________________________________________________

T. S. Eliot, the end of Little Gidding (No. 4 of ‘Four Quartets’)

“When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them.” (Acts 2: 1 – 4)

Curious, I checked. I went to hallmark.com and searched for a Pentecost card. Here’s what popped up: “We’re sorry, no results were found for ‘pentecost’. You may want to broaden your search by using more general terms.”

No Hallmark card. Not bad. But surprising in a day when so many people like to say, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Pentecost is about Spirit, and it’s one of the major feasts of the Church year, right up there with Christmas, Easter, the Feast of the Ascension, and All Saints.

That Pentecost is inconspicuous is as it should be. The Spirit is unassuming, televangelists notwithstanding (my kids think televangelism works great as comedy). The Spirit doesn’t go in for klieg lights. To hear Jesus talk about it, the Spirit’s primary business is to teach us and remind us of what Jesus said. That’s a big deal, that clarifying and sacred work, and we celebrate it this Sunday.

The first Pentecost was connected with an event well attested in the earliest history of the Church. The Day of Pentecost c. 33 AD already had a Hebrew festival celebrating the giving of the Law, and so Jerusalem was filled with pilgrims from the diaspora of Jews. The apostles of Jesus — hunted, depressed, confused, uncertain of their future — were together and were overtaken with a wind and what Luke calls “tongues of fire.”

To the sentiment that Jesus would stick around, a wish expressed by the Apostles themselves, Jesus’ gave remonstrance. He told his disciples that they would be better off if he left. “It is for your good that I am going away,” he said. “Unless I go away, the Comforter will not come to you; but if I go I will send him to you… . When he, the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth” (John 16).

And so the Spirit does. The Spirit gives us the language by which we are able to talk to God at all, to pray, to say the Creed or to say “Jesus is Lord.” The Spirit gives us breath to speak these things and, as Billy Shand put it, “apart from that breath we have nothing to say.” Eugene Peterson writes,

Turnips complete a fairly complex and useful life cycle without the use of words. Roses grace the world with extraordinary beauty and fragrance without uttering a word. It is quite impressive really, what goes on around us without words: ocean tides, mountain heights, stormy weather, turning constellations, genetic codes, bird migrations — most, in fact, of what we see and hear around us, a great deal of it incredibly complex, but without language, wordless. And we, we human beings, have words…. This human nature of ours with its mysterious capacity for language is paralleled in the nature of God. God speaks our language. In the term we use to refer to our interest in God, theology, the two words are set along side each other and then combined; theos meaning God and logos meaning word. Theos is capable of logos, logos is characteristic of theos. Then the significance of the parallel hits us: We are capable of speech; God reveals himself in speech. In the complete revelation of God, the Word became flesh.

The Spirit who brooded over chaos made possible roses and the world as we know it. It’s nothing to sneeze at. If you think you could make a better world give it your best shot. Knock yourself out. And remember this. The same Spirit came down upon the Church at Pentecost and forged a ragtag band of individuals into a force invincible against the whole might of the Roman Empire. 

The University of Michigan asked applicants for undergraduate admission to submit essay responses to the following prompt:

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.” (Robert Pirsig, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, p. 16)

Author Robert Pirsig (1928 — ) suggests that science has traditionally concerned itself with truth, while art has concerned itself with beauty. How might these two endeavors be the same? How might they be irreconcilably different?

Science doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about truth. Scientists do. Art doesn’t give a rat’s ass about beauty. Artists do. The scientist and the artist know what they are doing when they abstract — when they say “science concerns itself with truth” and “art concerns itself with beauty” — which they sometimes have to do. The artist is as smitten with truth as the scientist. The scientist is as smitten with beauty as the artist. Both knock on the same door, see the same splendors, drop the same handkerchiefs. And in their earnest flirtations with the world sometimes their very earnestness gets in the way.

The problem isn’t that science and art are irreconcilably different. The problem is that scientists and artists are irreducibly people, and people can be amnesiac. They forget that the world is as modest as she is alluring; that she can stand to be admired or studied only so much. Sketches and biology satisfy so long as we don’t reduce life to them.

Really talented people have had at least moments of trying. Richard Dawkins, an Oxford don and a Nobel Prize-winner in genetics, says that we human beings are “lumbering robots blindly programmed” by our genes which “control us body and mind.” Van Gogh had the gall to call this world “a study that didn’t come off.”

Disenchantment and lassitude are the subject of the celebrated early T. S. Eliot. “And I have known the eyes already, known them all — / The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? / And how should I presume?” As for the American novel, the fugitive nature of the true and the beautiful reaches its apotheosis in front of a couple of cabinets:

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”

I don’t suggest the one thing led to the other, but two years after Nick Carraway narrated The Great Gatsby, Eliot announced that he had converted to the orthodox Christian faith. The darling of the literati and the avant-garde had gone off the deep end as Auden would in 1940. Eliot published no major work for ten years. Some essays came forth, some plays, and then in 1943 Four Quartets appeared. It is the work of a man who has gotten beyond decadent aestheticism and the endlessly self-referential question “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Eliot became a critic of his earlier work, an artist with a new direction. Like Rat and Mole, he’d heard the music from another room.

By the end of the summer, when Gillian enters the ivy halls of Wheaton College — which to do is to get what Stanley Hauerwas calls “a damned good education” (he told me this as we stood next to each other making water at Boston College urinals) — only the caboose of our family will not have left home and taken his religion to school. Wherever Aaron matriculates, I hope he will be the kind of man moved by the scene of Daisy burying her face in Gatsby’s shirts. I hope he’ll be the kind of man who moves in the direction taken by Eliot and Auden and my Great Aunt Mena. If he does? He’ll know that education is something more than preparation for a game show. And when he watches the best game show ever and “Love Songs & Food for 800” is chosen, and Alex reads the answer, “‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’ he asked, and measured out his life” Aaron will be able to pose without need of with coffee spoons the question, “Who is T. S. Eliot?” and wonder if America gets the irony.

Gabriel Ellsworth
English 125: Major English Poets
Professor Linda Peterson
1st May 2009

T. S. Eliot and the Spiritual State of Society:

The Propagation of the Christian Faith in “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”

Throughout his career, Thomas Stearns Eliot was concerned with the spiritual depth, or lack thereof, in the life of the modern man. Often in Eliot’s poetry, an everyday scene inspires reflection on the part of the speaker about his own spiritual state and that of those he observes. In “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” Eliot describes his experience at a church service.¹ The images and the theological concepts that he considers while at church lead him to the realization that for the worshippers at church, and more broadly for the society of Eliot and his contemporaries, the Christian faith has lost the meaning and relevance that it once had and should have. In “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” Eliot suggests that Christianity has become static in modern society and no longer produces its once characteristic sense of ongoing, self-renewing fulfillment; moderns do not know the vital, self-propagating power of Christian revelation.

At first, Eliot’s surroundings at church suggest the generative power of the Christian faith. Eliot opens the poem with what appears to be a description of the stained glass windows of the church: “Polyphiloprogenitive / The sapient sutlers of the Lord / Drift across the window-panes” (1-3).² Presumably, the “sutlers” are the saints depicted in the stained glass. A sutler is a supplier of an army; by describing the saints as sutlers, Eliot attributes a very active role to them. Eliot draws on the traditional Christian metaphor of spiritual warfare as the cause that animates the faith. He suggests that the saints in the stained glass are involved in this conflict even now, long after they died. These great figures of the faith are supporting those who should currently be fighting the battle, namely those in the pews where Eliot finds himself. The verb that Eliot attributes to the sutlers is also noticeably active. Rather than being confined to one spot, the saints are, as Eliot experiences them, drifting and thus drawing the worshippers’ attention to the models of active Christian behavior that they represent. The saints are not simply moving about for show; Eliot hints that their movement is generative with the opening word of the poem. “Polyphiloprogenitive” may or may not technically be a neologism, but even if there are uses of it recorded in the 19^th century, they are surely few enough that Eliot’s use of the word is no less striking for their existence. Because the word itself is original, it suggests that the saints propound a faith that is fundamentally renewing and transformative.

Eliot further suggests the active propagation of the Christian faith with his Biblical allusion. After describing the drifting of the sutlers, he declares, “In the beginning was the Word” (4). Eliot quotes the famous opening words of the Gospel according to Saint John. In this passage, John describes the Incarnation in very august terms that lay the ground for the rest of the story of Jesus. This passage is familiar enough to the Christian ear that Eliot can expect many of his readers to know what follows it.³ Eliot demonstrates an important function of his allusions with this reference: by the mere fact that John’s words are so recognizable, Eliot invites the reader to complete the sentence whose beginning he quotes. Eliot evokes the awe-inspiring language of John’s opening verses with only one line; his ability to do so shows the power that this passage of Scripture commands over the members of a culture with Christian heritage, such as Eliot’s. The reference, by reminding the reader of how influential John’s words have been, shows the power of the Christian message to be passed down and experienced actively through the ages.

In the second stanza, Eliot’s reference to Origen hints at a disjunction between Christianity’s essential message and its practice. After repeating the allusion to the Gospel of John, Eliot writes, “Superfetation of to en, / And at the mensual turn of time / Produced enervate Origen” (6-8). He continues to associate the revelation of Christian truth, especially the Incarnation, with fertility. This association is threatened, if not broken down entirely, when Eliot refers to Origen of Alexandria. Origen interpreted Christ’s words about “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” (Matthew 19:12) literally and castrated himself. In the context of “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” in which Christian truth inspires generation, Origen’s self-emasculation seems questionable, if not thoroughly inappropriate. In the first stanza of the poem, the saints in the window and a passage from Scripture testify to the power of the Christian faith to propagate itself, which Origen literally prevents himself from doing. Eliot’s reference to Origen’s castration depends on an obsolete usage of “enervate.” In modern usage, the word generally means “weakened” or “lacking vigor.” Thus, Origen’s epithet suggests that, regardless of his intentions, Origen weakens the Christian faith because he cannot pass it on to progeny.⁴

Eliot further complicates the question of how and whether the Christian faith can retain its vitality with his description of a painting. At first, when he introduces the image, Eliot describes it almost as an art historian might: “A painter of the Umbrian school / Designed upon a gesso ground / The nimbus of the Baptized God” (9-11). He identifies the artist by a particular style known to connoisseurs of art, and he names the material on which the image is painted.⁵ This suggests that Eliot is at first removed from the painting, viewing it with an almost academic detachment. He is conscious of the fact that the nimbus was created within the context of a specific work of art by a historical painter. However, Eliot goes on to say, “The wilderness is cracked and browned. / But through the water pale and thin / Still shine the unoffending feet” (12-14). Eliot shifts to the present tense, which suggests that he is entering into a direct experience of the painting. It is as though he is watching Christ’s baptism directly with his own eyes. However, this experience is only momentary. Eliot finishes his description of the poem by completing the Trinity in the past tense: “And there above the painter set / The Father and the Paraclete” (15-16). Eliot is once again conscious of the fact that he is viewing a work of art created by a human being. He sees the Father and the Paraclete where he does because of a decision made by the painter, not necessarily because of any divine truth about the presence of the Trinity in Christ’s baptism. The scene of Christ’s baptism begins and ends in Eliot’s experience as an artifact to be viewed at a temporal distance.

The Christian faith has lost its immediacy for the other worshippers at the church service as well as for Eliot in his viewing of the painting. He writes, “The sable presbyters approach / The avenue of penitence; / The young are red and pustular / Clutching piaculative pence” (17-20). Eliot describes the priests going through the motions of the service and the young people holding offerings for the collection plate. Both of these groups are performing actions that could be part of authentic Christian practice. However, Eliot does not describe the spiritual benefits that should flow from these actions; rather, they seem static and unfulfilling. The presbyters “approach” the avenue of penitence, but Eliot never confirms that they in fact reach it. The priests come close to walking the Christian path of true repentance, but Eliot does not show them actually participating in this essential part of the Christian life. The young people, for their part, are described with a neologism: “piaculative.” Unlike the saints in the stained glass, however, the youth do not seem more generative or awe-inspiring because of the use of an unfamiliar word. Eliot never describes the pence achieving any sort of redemption or renewal for the youth. Beginning in the second stanza, Eliot has suggested the failure of the Christian message to be passed on and carried out in the fullness of its essential vitality. In its context within the poem, the neologism “piaculative” suggests a lack of real meaning in the clutching of the pence; it does not correspond to true spiritual sacrifice or pardon. Eliot seems to confirm over the course of the rest of poem that neither the presbyters nor the youth achieve any meaningful spiritual result from their actions. The only further description of the worshippers is in the next stanza. Eliot describes them standing “[u]nder the penitential gates” (21) but never indicates that they pass through the gates or that they experience any kind of true penitence.

At the end of the poem, Eliot suggests that it is not just the worshippers in the particular church where Eliot finds himself who fail to see the profound implications of the Christian message; rather, this failure is societal. The bees of the penultimate stanza perform a “[b]lest office of the epicene” (28) by fertilizing the flowers in the garden. The bees serve as a reminder of the importance of propagation in the natural life cycle; Eliot likely describes their work as “[b]lest” because it contributes to propagation, which he associates with the continued presence and relevance of Christian revelation at the beginning of the poem. Sweeney is the first of two figures in the final stanza of the poem who contrast with the bees. Eliot writes, “Sweeney shifts from ham to ham / Stirring the water in his bath” (29-30). Whereas the bees’ motion serves to generate new life, Sweeney’s motion seems merely self-indulgent; he moves to make himself comfortable. The stirring of the water contrasts with the description of Christ’s baptism earlier in the poem, where Christ’s feet “through the water pale and thin / Still shine” (13-14). Jesus retains his radiance even when covered with water because the water of baptism is a sign of something greater: that his life has been consecrated to a purpose. Sweeney, on the other hand, seems comfortably ensconced in his bathwater, in which he moves for his own comfort. The image of Sweeney bathing is, by comparison to the painting, the image of a modern man failing to look beyond himself to the truth expressed in the mysteries of Christian tradition.

Eliot concludes the poem with a rather cryptic couplet that further suggests that modern society overlooks the importance of Christian truth. After describing Sweeney in the bath, he writes, “The masters of the subtle schools / Are controversial, polymath” (31-32). Eliot recognizes that the masters do know a great deal by calling them “polymath,” but he provides no indication that they are any more aware than the other figures in the poem of the continuing relevance of the Christian message. “Polymath,” in designating what the masters have learned, also calls attention to the knowledge that is missing for most of the poem, beginning perhaps as early as the mention of Origen. Eliot as he considers the painting, the worshippers at church, and Sweeney all contribute to the impression that society does not know the transforming power of Christian truth. They lack this knowledge because the process of self-propagation that characterizes this truth at the beginning of the poem has for some reason been halted. The masters may know much about specific fields with which polymaths are familiar, but they have not received the revelation of God in the Christian story. “Controversy” comes from a Latin word meaning “turned against.” Perhaps the masters are “controversial” in this etymological sense; for all that they know, they seem only to confirm that modern society’s attitude towards religion has turned against the nature of Christian truth, relegating it to the past rather than recognizing its continuing power for the present and promise for the future. Insofar as the masters presumably represent the highest levels of knowledge in society, they help Eliot advance a broader societal diagnosis, for they show that Eliot’s modern society as a whole lacks an appropriate awareness of the transformative, regenerative power of the true essence of the Christian faith.

1. For the purposes of my analysis, I will assume that Eliot himself is the speaker of this poem. The title suggests that Eliot is in fact describing his own experience. In any case, spiritual barrenness, a common theme in Eliot’s work, seems to be a general trend that he observes in modern society, and thus my analysis does not depend on the speaker’s having any exact identity.

2. T. S. Eliot, “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” from Poems, 1920, in The Waste Land and Other Poems, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Penguin, 2003), pp. 49-50. Some details about the text are drawn from Kermode’s notes to the poem, p. 95.

3. “… and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1b-2, King James Version)

4. Whether Eliot is casting a judgment on the historical figure of Origen for the act of self-castration is a question that I have neither time nor space to treat here. At the very least, though, Origen in the context of the poem reminds the reader that Christians may find it difficult to live out and carry forward their faith authentically.

5. This painting is probably not in the church whose service Eliot is attending. Nevertheless, it is relevant for his analysis of the Sunday morning service, because it inspires reflection on Eliot’s part about a story and concepts that he might consider while sitting in the pews.

                                          If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

_______________________________________________________

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding, I, lines 41 – 50