Thursday, September 26, 2024

*** This is a rough transcript of today’s show ***

It is September 26th, 2024. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org. I’m Dan van Voorhis.

Longtime listeners of this show and former students may well know my affinity for T.S. Eliot. The Christian/Intellectual/Poet can stake a claim to be one of the most influential voices in the arts in the anglophone world in the 20th century- and this not considering that his work was the basis for the musical Cats.

I have also learned that not everyone loves modernist poetry or some Christians and artists and their existentially tortured lives. Fair enough, but even still, you should dig T.S. Eliot, at least when it comes to his relationship with the church, his conversion, and his cultural influence.

Thomas Sterns Eliot was born on this, the 26th of September in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. But his family life would center around Massachusetts where he came from a long line of prominent citizens and later Unitarians. Eliot would head to Harvard and graduate in 1909. He would undertake graduate studies at Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne before moving to London in 1914 where he worked as a banker, teacher, and editor.

He made a splash with his “the Love Song of J. Edgar Prufrock” in 1915- the poem that asked “Shall I part my hair behind?/Do I dare to eat a peach?” Was a modernist warm up for his early masterpiece, 1922’s “the Wasteland”. This poem, written before his conversion, remains (in my opinion) one of the most striking artistic depictions of a Europe broken by World War I.

He would enter the Anglican communion in 1927, the same year he would become a British citizen having married the Englishwoman Vivien Haigh-Wood. He would not make much of his conversion to Christianity- he swore the clergyman who baptized him to secrecy about the matter and wrote in a letter, “I hate spectacular conversions.”

But his conversion shocked many in the literary crowd who saw him as a voice of a new generation, radicals formed by the death of the old system. Virginia Woolf proclaimed that he would soon "drop his Christianity with his wife, as one might empty the fishbones after the herring.” She was incorrect.

He wrote of his Unitarian upbringing that it was “a bad preparation for brass tacks like birth, copulation, death, hell, heaven and insanity”. He claimed that the atheism of his friend, Bertrand Russell was the result of childish thinking. He would write that “The Christian scheme seemed the only possible scheme which found a place for values which I must maintain or perish” and later, “I know just enough - and no more - of ‘the peace of God’ to know that it an extraordinarily painful Blessing…faith is not a substitute for anything: it does not give the things life has refused, but something else.”

He famously claimed that he was a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”. But he clarified, lest he be seen as a partisan, that “the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.”

Early on in his conversion he was drawn to the writings of the likes of John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes, poetic and thoughtful men of the Anglican tradition. Eliot’s poem “Journey of the Magi” was based on a sermon from Andrewes, and the Magi’s journey from a distance would mirror Eliot’s own conversion, he would- with the Magi, reflect on the birth and death of the Messiah.

“this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.”

Eliot would cement himself as a poet par excellence and Christian intellectual with his poems “Ash Wednesday” and “The Four Quartets” and his play “Murder in the Cathedral.” In 1948, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“No longer at ease here,” he saw the death that leads to eternal life in 1965. Born on September 26th, 1888, Thomas Stearns Eliot was 76 years old.

 

The last word for today is from the daily lectionary and Psalm 124- another of the psalms of ascent- sung by pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem:

If the Lord had not been on our side—

    let Israel say—

if the Lord had not been on our side

    when people attacked us,

they would have swallowed us alive

    when their anger flared against us;

the flood would have engulfed us,

    the torrent would have swept over us,

the raging waters

    would have swept us away.

Praise be to the Lord,

    who has not let us be torn by their teeth.

We have escaped like a bird

    from the fowler’s snare;


the snare has been broken,

    and we have escaped.

Our help is in the name of the Lord,

    the Maker of heaven and earth.

 

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 26th of September 2024, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man,  “Hav[ing] known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, [He has] measured out [his] life with coffee spoons”- he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who remembers when that line was used for a song by the Crash Test Dummies- their best, in my opinion- I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.