T.S. Eliot: Session 1

Turning to the Mystics with James Finley

Center for Action and Contemplation

Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is the first session that focuses on the poet T.S. Eliot and his work, Four Quartets. In the tenor of the ancient practice of Lectio Divina, James Finley begins with passages from Four Quartets, reflects on the qualitative essence of the spirit of this text, and finishes with a meditative practice. Resources: Turning to the Mystics is a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more about James Finley, visit his faculty profile here. The transcript for this episode can be found here. The book we will be using this season can be found here. A free version can be accessed online here. Connect with us: Have a question you'd like Jim or Kirsten to answer about this season? Email us: [email protected] Send us a voicemail: cac.org/voicemail We'll be accepting questions for our Listener Questions episode until November 7th, 2024. This podcast is made possible, thanks to the generosity of our donors. If you would love to support the ongoing work of the Center for Action and Contemplation and the continued work of our podcasts, you can donate at https://cac.org/support-cac/podcasts/ Thank you!

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation.
0:04.4	To learn more, visit cacac.org.
0:10.0	Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.
0:13.2	Welcome to turning to the mysteries.
0:16.2	Greetings everyone and welcome to our time together turning for
0:28.0	trustworthy guidance to T.S. Elliott's poem Four Quartets.
0:34.3	In the introductory session that I did with Kirsten,
0:37.6	we noted that the autobiographical foundations
0:40.5	of T.S. Eliot's poetry is a theme of suffering.
0:45.0	And it comes at a societal level in that he lived through the First World War
0:50.6	and then also lived through the Second World War.
0:53.0	So he knew this widespread despair and trauma and nightmare and chaos.
0:58.0	And in a poem he wrote called The Wasteland,
1:01.0	it captured that despair in the darkness of the world. But later on as
1:07.1	his life moved on we see in this poem Ash Wednesday and in this poem four quartets a new theme emerging.
1:15.0	And the theme that's emerging is the theme of offering guidance
1:22.0	in finding our way to be experientially grounded in God's presence in our life.
1:27.0	That transcends the suffering, sustains us in the suffering.
1:37.7	In an inner peace that doesn't necessarily take away the suffering, but it delivers us from the tyranny of suffering because the love of God were learning to be
1:44.8	established in sustains us in it and transcends it. So really the poem is
1:50.5	about experiential salvation.
1:53.0	It's a poem of this transformative awakening of ourselves,
	...

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