April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

-T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland, is considered one of the more difficult and technically intimidating pieces of literature that has ever been written.  What causes it to be considered so difficult is that it contains a great deal of what is called Intertextuality, which means that there are references within The Wasteland to other literary sources, Eliot’s most prominent references being the Bible and Dante’s Inferno, he also includes St. Augustine’s Confessions, as well as numerous non-Christian ancient texts.  But it is somewhat frustrating and futile to follow the playful use of intertextual references by an extremely learned author lest you find yourself diving down a myriad of rabbit warrens in search of what “he really meant.”  The highest purpose of literature is to convey truth.  So it is perhaps more valuable to seek the truth that may be found in a writing such as this. One of the great benefits of Christian faith is that it allows us to compare “The Truth” of God with all the various truths that humans may invent.  Literature like The Wasteland resonates with “The Truth” that is not based on the concoctions of the human brain.

“April is the cruelest month,” the poem begins with something that flies in the face of conventional thinking.  April is generally considered to be the height of spring, perhaps not as verdant as May or June but certainly a time of beginnings and new life.  April is only cruel to the old order, the dead land of winter, the sterile environment of desperation.  Spring is a time of rebirth.  Christian faith tells us to embrace this sort of rebirth; spring causes newness, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land.” But what is to come is not divorced from what was in the past.  That saturated world of literary and cultural references that Eliot works into his work is also existent in the Church.  As we contemplate what seems to be a cycle of dying and re-birth in the American church we must be aware that the old things will not simply go away, they will influence and shape the things that are to come and how the Body of Christ will continue on into the future. The traditions of the Church will be inevitably entwined with the life of the body of Christ in the future, “mixing memory and desire.”  The memory is the reverent observance of the good things of the past and the desire is for a faithful walk with God in the future. 

The traditions of the Church can and should provide the foundation and the fuel for new growth but only if we are willing to endure and embrace the cruelty of the new growth, “stirring dull roots with spring rain.”  The dull roots are necessary biologically for the continued growth of certain species of plants; they sleep in dormancy through winter, and awake to sprout new life in spring.  Likewise, the way the church “used to be” has begun to die off.  In some cases our living parts have disappeared already but the seed of new life is not gone.  The spring rain of the Holy Spirit is coming, it will cause those dull roots to begin to grow and produce.  It may be painful at times, it may seem cruel but in order for the life of the Church to flourish it is necessary.  What can we rely on in these times of change?  The Wasteland ends with the phrase, “Shantih, shantih, shantih.”  It is a quotation from a Hindu metaphysical writing called an Upanishad.  Eliot is not, however, espousing Hindu spirituality.  “Shantih,” translates best into English as, “The peace that passes understanding.”

My November Guest

By Robert Frost

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,

Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

Are beautiful as days can be

She loves the bare, the withered tree;

She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.

She talks and I am fain to list:

She’s glad the birds are gone away,

She’s glad her simple worsted gray

Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,

The faded earth, the heavy sky,

The beauties she so truly sees,

She thinks I have no eye for these,

And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know

The love of bare November days

Before the coming of the snow,

But it were vain to tell her so,

And they are better for her praise.

The world tells us that summer sunshine is the ideal; we celebrate late spring with an almost pagan revelry of picnics, holidays and festivals; most of us spend the bulk of our vacations trying to enjoy the epitome of summer, getting tan, lounging in the sun, making our pilgrimage to beaches, lakes and rivers.  We link sunshine and warmth to being happy, we describe someone who is pleasant and content as having a “sunny” disposition.  We even classify joy as a “fruit of the spirit,” therefore God must want us to be happy and “sunny” at all times.  Some even press this point so far as to say that being un-joyful is somehow rejecting God’s blessings.  But sunshine and flowers are not where we spend most of our lives.  In fact, in my experience, happiness in the worldly sense can be quite different from joy as we find it in Scriptures, the most profound joy is often found when suffering comes to an end (children to the barren, comfort to the exiles, salvation to the lost).  There is a paradox somewhere here between sorrow and joy, the two things are not exactly as opposite as they might seem.  The poet has observed this paradox in his sublime description of the sorrow that visits him in November as a sensitive and beautiful lady.  I know that sometimes a rainy day is quite comforting and the crunch of dead leaves underfoot brings a deep sense of peace, grief can bring a sharp awareness of simple beauty.  Often where we find paradox in our experience and observation of the world it should encourage us to look there for God.  November is proof that God sometimes enjoys the comfort of being sad.

            This month is stuck in limbo between fall and winter; rain is cold and devoid of the life-giving character it has in April.  If there is snow it is only spits and flurries, it will not accumulate in heavy, silent blankets that lend the sleeping world such white austerity.  Things are bare and gray in November, the red and gold of dying leaves are gone, gray trunks stand against brown hills.  The world tries to get us to look past November quickly, “think about Thanksgiving, deer season, advent, don’t pay too much attention to the gray, uneventful stretching of the month, don’t get too involved with that melancholy time, don’t reflect too much on the passing of another year.”  The Spirit of the Age abhors melancholy because it puts us too close to the unadorned beauty of God’s world. 

            I’m not talking here about depression that becomes despair, which once again is useful to our enemy, I’m talking about that peculiar form of sadness, which actually wakes us up and helps us to see reality and beauty.  This is where that paradox comes in; there are times when sorrow is the gateway to seeing beauty and through that sight actually experiencing joy.  Poets often write of this paradoxical journey as Mr. Frost has but the wisdom of the age has told us that seeking joy and beauty in sorrow is folly, much better to settle for mere happiness.  It is no coincidence that our culture is losing touch with its poets at the same time as it is losing touch with God.  Poets, whether they are religious or not, are intimately concerned with observations of truth and beauty, these things are the special provenance of God.  But the world will try to convince you to always search for the laughing, sun-drenched girls of summer and to cut yourself off from your November guest, from that mature, gray-clad woman, who walks through the sad landscape and tells you where truth and beauty might be found.

            Cut her off and you cut off the poetry of our existence, cut out the poetry and you essentially lobotomize our existence by reducing words to mere technical things instead of sacred things.  Words are sacred; John wrote: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”  That is poetry, it may not be easy to really understand but it is at the core of what it means to be human and to be in relationship to God, our connection to our Creator is primarily mediated by the Word and by extension words that we write, speak, read and hear.   Sorrow is one of those words, full of truth and beauty.  It may seem difficult to welcome her as your guest, but should you make the effort you may find that joy is not far behind, for as the poet says these November days are “better for her praise.”