Gerontion[1]

T. S. Eliot

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation[2]
Of the backward devils[3]
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact?

The title of this poem, "Gerontion," is a derogatory Greek word that means "little old man." The poem opens with the line, "Here I am, an old man in a dry season..."

In the poem Eliot describes a man who has grown old and cold. He wonders, "Is the end of life to know that life has ended? Is existence thus without purpose and meaning--an empty show?" He looks back on his past with profound regret: he who once was close to God now finds himself far away. Beauty has been twisted into fear; fear into doubt. He has lost his passion for God. Why retrieve it when "what is kept" is no longer worth keeping?

The phrase, "I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch," is drawn from a poem by John Henry Newman in which he, as mind and memory faded, lamented that he had "Nor touch, nor taste, nor hearing (of God)."[4] He had lost sight of eternal reality and the age to come.

So, we too may lapse into senility and lose our grip on God,[5] but we have not made our "show" of faith purposelessly, nor have we reached our "conclusion" when at last we "stiffen" in our beds. Despite the weakness and futility of our final years, "the tiger springs." This is Blake's "Christ the Tyger." "Us he devours"; we are his natural prey. Though senility may obliterate our faith and passion for our Lord, he pursues us to the end, for he has promised to keep us from falling and to bring us into his glorious presence without fault or blame.[6] There, once again, we will find his face and hear our name. This is the assurance of One who cannot lie.

Henry Durbanville, a Scottish Presbyterian pastor of another era, writes of an elderly parishioner who lamented, "Pastor, I have forgotten all of God's promises." "Aye," replied Durbanville, "but he has not forgotten one of his promises to you."

DHR

[1] This is but a snippet from a much longer and very difficult poem.
[2] Concitation: The act of stirring up, exciting,
[3] The false-prophets in Dante's Inferno (XX), having presumed to foretell the future, were condemned to walk backwards.
[4] From "The Dream of Gerontius" by John Henry Newman
[5] I have a friend who lapsed into Alzheimer's Disease as he aged. For forty years or more he was a great lover of God and his word. My last visit with him is indelibly traced in my mind: He was sitting up in his deathbed...swearing like a pirate!
[6] Jude 24

NOBODY

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you-nobody-too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! They'd advertise-you know.

-Emily Dickinson

I'm fond of Emily Dickinson, that strange and solitary person, whose poems reflect an intense desire for obscurity. Her anonymity can be construed as humility--it should not concern us at all that people do not know us--but for some, a retiring nature is grounded in a profound sense of insecurity and a deep dislike for oneself: "I'm someone to be kept out of sight."

Perhaps you're like that: wondering why God ever made you, longing to be someone else. But is it not better to be what God has chosen to make you? "For to have been thought about--born in God's thoughts--and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest, most precious thing in all thinking. Is it not...?"(George MacDonald).

David elaborates the same thought in the 139th Psalm, describing himself en utero as God's special creation, pondering "this awesome being that is me!"

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful (Hebrew: awesome!). I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth (his mother's womb), your eyes saw my unformed body (fetus). All the days ordained for me were written in your book (the blueprint for me) before one of them came to be.

Do you realize that you have been thought about and uniquely hand-crafted by God? You are one of a kind, woven together according to a divine template, intricately "embroidered" (David's word) in your mother's womb, a creation that that has no parallel in the universe. "How is it that you came to be you? God thought about you, and so you grew."

Long before you were born, you existed in God's thoughts. Long before your parents loved or neglected you, your peers admired or rejected you, your teachers, colleagues, and employers encouraged or disheartened you, you were known and loved by Love itself. God saw you and took delight in you. He gazed at what he had made and was glad. He loved it and said, "It is good!"

And someday, if you give your self to God, you too will begin to love what he has made, and will forget the self you now abhor. If you could but see yourself now as you will someday be--a lustrous, exquisitely beautiful, immortal being--you would be stupefied.

I think that is why, at least in part, God allowed his disciples to see his glory on the Mount of Transfiguration. One early Church Father, the Venerable Bede thought so: "By his loving foresight he (Jesus) prepared them (the disciples) to endure adversity bravely by allowing them to taste for a short time the contemplation of their (own) everlasting glory (beauty)"(Quoted by Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 3a, 38).

So, there is unimagined splendor ahead, but even now, the love of God is at work in you to transform unsightliness into the inexpressible beauty of holiness.

What once was hurt; what once was friction;
What left a mark, no longer sting.
For Grace makes beauty out of ugly things ("Grace" by U2).

The Love that fills the earth with lovely things is making you lovely. It is beginning now. It will go on forever, for there is no end to infinite love.

DHR

Further thoughts on Grace Abounding...

In 1660, John Bunyan was indicted for preaching the gospel without a license, and sent to Bedford Gaol. There he remained until 1672, when Charles II issued the Declaration of Religious Indulgence. During that time he supported his wife and four children, one of whom was blind, by weaving shoelaces. For twelve years his family lived in wretched poverty. He spoke of his poor blind child, Mary, reduced to begging and exposed to physical abuse.

He tells the story in an appendix to his autobiography, Grace Abounding.

Three times Bunyan petitioned the court for leniency. The last time he sent his wife, Elizabeth, in the hope that her pitiable condition would soften the hearts of the magistrates. Instead, they drove her away.

Bunyan describes her reaction in her own words: "Though I was somewhat timorous at my first entrance into the chamber, yet before I went out, I could not but break forth into tears, not so much because they were so hard-hearted against me, and my husband, but to think what a sad account such poor creatures will have to give at the coming of the Lord, when they shall answer for all things whatsoever they have done in the body, whether it be good or whether it be bad."

I was touched by Elizabeth's tears for those who treated her so cruelly, and her concern for their spiritual well being...and thought of Jeremiah’s sorrow over the imminent destruction of Moab, Judah‘s bitter enemy: “I will weep for Moab, / And I will cry out for all Moab; / I will mourn for the men of Kir Heres (the capital city).”[1]

There is no glee here. Only sorrow. Here again is the face that grace turns toward its adversaries.

DHR

[1] Jeremiah 48:31

Bel Bows Down

Bel bows down, Nebo stoops;[1]
Their idols were on the beasts and on the cattle.
Your carriages were heavily loaded,
A burden to the weary beast.

They stoop, they bow down together;
They could not deliver the burden,
But have themselves gone into captivity.

"Listen to Me, O house of Jacob,
And all the remnant of the house of Israel,
Who have been upheld by Me from birth,
Who have been carried from the womb:

Even to your old age, I am He,
And even to gray hairs I will carry you!
I have made, and I will bear;
Even I will carry, and will deliver you.

-Isaiah 46.1-4

Isaiah foresees the siege of Babylon and the hasty evacuation of her idols. The carts and carriages on which the idols are loaded creak and groan, the weary animals labor under the burden of their load--a reminder that all our human artifacts-the "stuff" we give our devotion to and spend a lifetime acquiring--become a heavy burden at last.

In contrast, God bears (carries) his children from the cradle to the grave. “I made you,” he reminds us, and I will bear you-even to old age...even to gray hairs I will carry you!” [2]

"I made you." Nothing could be more comforting, for He makes nothing that is not good. God brought us into being through the parents he allowed. He permitted the infirmities and liabilities that have attended our years. He allows the cruel calamities that bring us to our knees. All this is that we may cast ourselves on him. His grace is sufficient, for our weakness calls forth his tender, loving care.

"I will bear." Our Lord has borne our sins in his body on the cross. He has borne our grief and sorrows. He has borne our waywardness; put up with our weaknesses; carried us when we could not walk, or stand. Will he then forsake us when we are old and gray? No! "His love in time past forbids (us) to think that he'll leave (us) at last ..."[3]

So we may cast our burdens upon him because he has cared and will continue to care for us. "Fear not that thy need shall exceed His provision, / Our God ever yearns His resources to share; / Lean hard on the arm everlasting, availing; / Thy Father both thee and thy load will upbear."[4]

DHR

[1] Bel (Baal) was the patron deity of Babylon; Nebo, in their mythology, was his son.
[2] The contrast is precise and vivid in the Hebrew text: The carts and carriages are "loaded" with weight (vs. 1). We are "loaded" upon God (vs. 3). Idols are a "burden" (i.e., a thing carried) (vs. 1); God has "carried" us from the womb (vs. 3). Idolaters cannot "escape" the burden (vs. 2). God carries our burdens and allows us to "escape" the load (vs. 4).
[3] From John Newton, "Begone, Unbelief, My Savior is Near."
[4] Annie Flint, “He Giveth More Grace”

A New Year Wish

-George Matheson

I sent a New-Year wish to a friend
Who stood at the gate of life's morning hours,
And I breathed it thus: 'From beginning to end
May your path be strewn with flowers!'
But, as I thought of the words I chose,
I paused to ponder if it were well
To leave no place for a thorn in the rose
Of the fate I would foretell.

I sat down to wish my wish once more,
And the words to a nobler song were lined:
May thy path be covered from shore to shore
With the flowers thou hast left behind;
Be it thine to pluck from thy way the thorn
And with bleeding hand plant the roses red,
That the sons of men in the days unborn
On a path of flowers may tread.

And such, my soul, is my wish for thee-
Thy Father's wish in the heaven above
That thy road in life may a pathway be
Bedecked with the flowers of love.
The flowers of love are not nature's flowers,
They are not born in the desert air;
They are brought from the heart's far distant bowers,
And must be transplanted there.

Thou shalt find the Canaanite in the land-
I shall not wish that it were not so;
It is good the seed should be sown by thy hand
Where the briers were wont to grow.
Of all good wishes it is the best-
Best use for life and best cure for pain-
That thy hands should toil for another's rest,
And plant for another's gain.

If I could re-write the biographies of those I love, would I ask that God pluck every thorn from the way and "their path be strewn with flowers"? No, though I wish it were not so, "it is good that seed should be sown by (the) hand where briars are wont to grow"; better than flowery beds of ease are the flowers that are left behind.

So I would pray, not for ease and comfort, but for God's strength to endure every pain, for the best seed is sown by the hand "where briers (are) want to grow." This is the "best use for life and the best cure for pain"-that our hands should toil for another's rest and plant love for another's gain.

These plantings are not "nature's flowers," but transplantings from above. They flourish in the heart's "far-distant bower," that place of shade and shelter where we meet with God and our hearts are nourished by his love. Then, through thorny ways he gives the strength to sow seeds of love and leave righteousness and peace behind. There, in our path, "a pine tree shall grow instead of a nettle and a myrtle instead of a thorn. It will be to the LORD's credit, an everlasting monument to his name that will never be effaced" (Isaiah 55:13).

DHR

Safe!

“We're safe," said Ford, after his first ever teleport transfer (and discovering that he and Arthur had been transported onto the bridge of an enemy space ship). "Ah," said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of."

--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Spring of Gihon lies on the eastern flank of Mount Zion and, in Hezekiah's day, lay outside the walls of Jerusalem. Foreseeing a siege by the Assyrian army, and believing that the location of the spring was the city's weak point, Hezekiah drove a shaft from the spring through solid rock and directed the water inside the walls to the Pool of Siloam. He then closed off the "old pool" (the pool of the spring Gihon) and built a second wall to enclose it. Thus Hezekiah made Jerusalem safe.[1]

Isaiah observed: "You made a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the old pool. But you did not look to its Maker, nor did you have respect for Him who fashioned it long ago."[2] The irony of the project, according to the prophet, was that God, who fashioned the spring long ago, deliberately placed it outside the walls. Its location was divinely designed to make Jerusalem weak and vulnerable.[3] Weakness was God's will for the city.

As it turned out, Hezekiah's walls and water system were wasted time and effort. God delivered the city in a way that had nothing to do with their endeavor. You can read the story for yourself in 2 Chronicles 32.

Here again is the abiding principle that God creates weakness in us that we may become strong. Our physical, mental, social, and emotional limitations were fashioned long ago that we may know our Lord's abiding, boundless strength.

Therefore, we can never say of anything God asks us to do, "It is too hard for me," for our weakness, when acknowledged, brings us to prayer and into the presence of God's infinite power. Our weakest points become our strength, if we have regard for him who fashioned those weaknesses long ago.

Paul, who was fond of paradox, put it this way: "When I am weak then I am strong."[4] We're most safe when we're most vulnerable--a "strange usage of the word 'safe,'" I must say.

DHR

[1] Cf., 2 Chronicles 32:20
[2] Isaiah 22:11
[3] It was, in fact, the means by which David gained access to the old Jebusite citadel of Jerusalem when it was in the hands of the Canaanites (2 Samuel 5:6-10).
[4] 2 Corinthians 12:10

Limping Home

Your rigging hangs loose:
The mast is not held secure,
Thus your sail is not spread.
But an abundance of spoils will be divided
That which limps will have carried off plunder.

-Isaiah 33.23

Isaiah sees an ancient storm-battered sailing ship, limping into port. Topside, her stays are broken, her mast is atilt; her "sail is not spread." A wrecked and ravaged vessel, yet her hold is laden with treasure.

The port of call is a city that heretofore has been too "far off" to see. There one's eyes gaze upon "a king"[1] who is beautiful beyond description. His city is "a place of broad rivers and streams," but no warships ply those waters; "no galleys sail them." There is no terror there, no suffering, no sickness, no sin. "No one living (there) will say, 'I am ill'; and the sins of those who dwell there will be forgiven." There, at last, our journey will be over, our "tent stakes will never again be pulled up." We will have reached our final destination, "a quiet place," the home that will, at last, heal the homesickness that has marked our days.[2]

And so, though I limp toward that harbor, I must say that my ship is laden with treasure: the comfort of godly parents and a stable home, eternal salvation when but a child, a wise, loving, forgiving wife who lights up my eyes; our three sons and their families that bring me colossal joy; many years to love and serve others; God's forgiveness for all my failings; his grace to renew every effort; his loving kindness that has followed me all my days. Indeed, my hold is filled with the goodness of God.

An ancient bark, limping home, but laden with treasure!--an apt metaphor for this old hull.

DHR

[1] The noun, "king" has no article, but we know the king Isaiah had in mind.
[2] Cf., Isaiah 33:17-24. Cp., Revelation 21:1-22:5

E-musings are archived at http://davidroper.blogspot.com/