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Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Welcome to turning to the mysteries.

Greetings everyone and welcome to our time together turning for guidance to the

teachings found in T.S. Elliot's poem, Four Quartets.

The fourth and final poem we've now come to is titled Little Gidding.

And Little Gidding is a chapel, a small chapel in the English countryside, where in the past a community

of people gathered for prayer.

And so little getting is really the grand finale of the whole poem.

Because all through the poem, the struggle to find our way into primordial time beyond time.

And it goes on and on and on. In the end it's resolved in prayer

to kneel where prayer has been valid and so really this is also where it becomes explicitly mystical about God's

oneness with us woven into the suffering of our life, the love of our life, and

every aspect of life itself is ultimately divine.

And so it's really just a lovely,

kind of eloquent kind of crescendo

to the whole poem.

And so with this in mind, we turn to the poem itself.

And in the poem, a Chiaz Elliot begins by telling us,

The midwinter spring is its own season,

Sempaternal, though sodden toward sundown.

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