Nielsen’s Nook

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter. [1]

These lines of Eliot give me pause to ponder. Many changes have come in life and many that I have longed for have eluded me. A hardened unbelieving retirement age man told me one time that he did not have any regrets towards the end of his life. What sort of devil can so numb our souls that we become indifferent to the sense of loss and regret that grows up around us, great weeds in our aging garden?

I watch my little girl play in the sprinklers, make mud volcanoes, and sprinkle music power on me. Flashes of the once-before short like a fused bulb across my weathered memory. Ah, when time was free and naivety had thrown its blissful cloak across the mud puddle.

There was something tranquil about the moment. It wasn’t important that we were in our back yard. It wasn’t important that we were together on a Saturday or otherwise. The warming peace that comes, even now while writing, is that of simple communion, just being together. Contentment, I think, is the obscene key to unlocking love.

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. [2]

I’m 34 and I’ve got regrets. Places I should have gone. Things I should have studied. Holes that I can’t seem to circumscribe. And yet, if I understand Eliot here, the exploration is not sailing away from our regrets, but moving through them.

For me, I am sure that I will never mature past the Cross, where in Jesus’ perfect sacrifice, God passes over and forgives all for which I have regret. The Eucharist is a cross-shaped celebration of life in Jesus, where all the holes are circumscribed. It is a time when I confess my sins, taste the goodness of God, and hear the Gospel of grace proclaimed over me in thought, word, and deed. In the stillness there is a reposed reminder that I am aboard a Great Ship that continues moving Christward as it has for millennia. In dying I am raised, indeed my end is my beginning.

[1] Eliot, T.S. East Coker, V.190-201.

[2] Eliot, T.S. East Coker, V.202-209.