Ash Wednesday

I was very fortunate in high school to have, in my junior and senior years, two wonderful English teachers.  They introduced me to Shakespeare, and Donne, and Faulkner, and Tennyson.  And T.S. Eliot.  Especially T.S. Eliot.

Something about Eliot got its hooks into me, and never let go.  It was so complex, like a vast puzzle, but there was something simple and real and profound underneath all of the allusions and references.  I wrote my senior English paper on Eliot's "Four Quartets."  I have no idea what I said in that paper, but it was probably something stupid--who knows anything as a 17 year old?  Nevertheless, I tried.

For Ash Wednesday today, I reread Eliot's "Ash Wednesday."  I was struck by this section at the end of Part I:

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

 Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

 Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

There is no time machine.  We cannot go back and undo the things we have done.  We can only resolve not to do them again.  But resolving to not repeat our mistakes is not enough.  Being forgiven is not a passive act by the receiver of forgiveness.  The one being forgiven must allow himself or herself to be forgiven, to accept forgiveness.  And part of that process involves letting go of the things that have been done, even if they have been done by us.  It involves a kind of forgetting, of learning "to care, and not to care."

Anyway, thanks Mr. Eliot.  And thanks to Frank Smyth and "Wild" Bill MacGruder.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris.  I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be.  As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality.  It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the...
Read more

On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out ...
Read more

A Reflection on the Past, and Also on Art

Exactly twenty-two years ago, in February of 2002, I was living in River Forest, Illinois, finishing up my undergraduate degree.  I was living in an enormous old priory, hoping that I would be able to join the Dominicans when I was done with school in the summer (which, in fact, happened).  The priory was built in the 50s, when the Dominicans would have classes of a fifty or sixty students a year.  Those days were long gone, and so I was the only person living on the hall, on the far other side of the building from the actual Dominicans.  Other than meals, I was basically living entirely by myself. In my evenings, after getting done with my homework, I had a ritual on weekdays.  I would turn on the radio to the Chicago rock radio station Q101 and listen to the syndicated show Loveline .  Loveline  was a call-in show, focused on giving sex and relationship advice to teenagers and twenty-somethings.  The hosts of the show were comedian Adam Corolla ...
Read more