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.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
T.S. Eliot, from "Little Gidding"
Church. Religion. Spirituality. I used to have a collection of C.S. Lewis essays called "Six by Lewis." I read most of them at one time, mostly at the urging of my friend Ted. He was always interested in reading more about Christianity, specifically, and spirituality, in general. I remember his brief affair with Krishna in 11th grade. He had prayer beads hung from the rear-view mirror of his Impala. I liked the Houston temple restaurant. Later, in 12th grade, Ted stumbled onto/into Pentecostalism, led, really, by a cute girl named Jolie. I didn't even like the bread and wine there. Finally, he found the Episcopalian church, inspired, perhaps, by Eliot and Lewis. Nevertheless, though he wandered some through college, the church remained at his center. From medieval spiritualism to mid-century Merton, Ted followed his heart through an exploration I wanted no part of--and yet secretly envied.
I was raised in church. There was never a time in my childhood or adolescence where church, Christianity, doctrine, etc. were not present realities. I didn't need to explore. God exists. Christ exists. The Holy Spirit exists. These are not in doubt. At least not on Sunday mornings.
When I was in 12th grade, the doubts and questions that nibbled at me the other six days refused to quiet down on Sundays. Church was matter-of-fact, yes, but shouldn't it be holy? Shouldn't it be a moment of epiphany? Was the story of Christianity not the great romance of human history? How could something so enormous be so matter-of-fact. Truth be told, I experienced a greater rush entering a used book store than I did entering the sanctuary of my family church. Nor did I thrill to the sounds of the music being played (so long, traditional hymns; hello, childish, repetitive choruses and generic canned music). The Southern Baptists are low on tradition as 'tis (unless you count the six repetitions of the last verse of "Just as I Am" at the invitation). Once you take the hymns away, you're left with just a hyperactive music director and a congregation filled with housewives convinced that they're the next Amy Grants or Sandy Patties.
College, its geographic distance from my parents and the family church, arrived with much relief. Finally, I could research the various approaches to God, to Heaven, to spirituality. That was the intent. The reality has been written better by the boys of Uncle Tupleo;
When the Bible is a bottle
And a hardwood floor is home
When morning comes twice a day
Or not at all
from "Still Be Around"
In other words, I drank and smoked and cussed and fornicated. Only, unlike the roving evangelists who would entertain the youth group with tales of drug use and drinking and lawlessness, all traded in at the end of college for a holy fire that burned 'em clean, my debauchery was not a preface to salvation. It just quieted down to a general apathy and subtle agnosticism.
In graduate school, a beloved professor brought to my attention Eliot's Four Quartets. He (the professor) would not have known of my spiritual crises, such as it was. Rather, I believe I was rambling on (as I do) about Eliot and Hopkins and the influence of religion upon their poetry (though with Hopkins, it was definitely something more primal even that religion, even a religion as fraught with mystery and mysticism as is Catholicism), referencing the contrast between "Prufrock" and "Ash Wednesday," when Dr. Prof asked me had I ever read Four Quartets. I had not.
Now, of course, I have, or this lead-up would be even less interesting than it is already. In fact, I should just delete everything above and leave this: From Yeats' slouching creature, I turned and found these words:
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.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
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; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
from "Burnt Norton"
;)