Rhythm and Ruggedness of Life

In his magical 1922 poem "The Waste Land," T. S. Eliot opens with a glimpse of the spring struggle inherent in the month of April:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Eliot wrote "The WasteLand" in the aftermath of the first global pandemic, not long after he and his wife had recovered from the deadly Spanish Flu in the winter of 1918. Between 1918 and 1920, some 100 million people around the globe died from the Spanish Flu -- more even than were killed in World War I. In Eliot's new homeland England, one-fourth of the population contracted the disease and more than 200,000 people died. Listen to his description of London as he grapples with what life will be like emerging from such a horrific time:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, show and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Eliot, who earned the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, allowed the rhythm and ruggedness of life to undergird his work. After his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927, a groundwork of Orthodox Christianity informed much of his poetry, and his lyrical verse Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats was adapted into Andrew Lloyd Webber's Broadway musical Cats. You can read a full version of "The Waste Land" here.

As we ponder together both the post-Easter wrestle of spring and emergence from a global pandemic, what will your poem be? How will you encounter both the familiar and the new, and how will you introduce Christ's light into each new moment?

Blessings on you as you encounter the beauty of April this week,

Jennie