Oh, my holiday decorations are not even put away; the Christmas tree still sparkles in our living room. Even so, the church calendar speeds along quickly this year, and Ash Wednesday is just over a month away.
I’m trying to find some focus for our Lenten season by reflecting on experiences of solitude, meditation, and prayer. Today I’ve been living with the poetry of T.S. Eliot, particularly Burnt Norton from his collection Four Quartets. Eliot writes of the elusive nature of time and meaning.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy
The resolution of its partial horror.
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Is Lent a time in which we walk in the garden along with Eliot? We move from stories of the ancient past and our own pasts, dwelling in the present, and all the while wondering about the future. Do we find moments that are still points? Places in which we encounter the transcendent in the midst of the hurriedness of life? Those fleeting moments, “neither from nor towards,” may be the space in which our hearts are free to dance.
