Beyond the fires of suffering, regeneration, and illumination comes oneness: the unity experienced only by the beatified, who, having come to their end, are at their beginning.
By Tessa Carman
You have tasted of death now,” said the old man. “Is it good?”
“It is good,” said Mossy. “It is better than life.”
“No,” said the old man: “it is only more life.”
― George MacDonald, The Golden Key
Sometimes in the mid-afternoon kitchen light, my six-year-old daughter emerges from her quiet time and asks for a snack, and then reveals what she’s been mulling over. Lately we’ve been getting into the deep stuff, the hard stuff: why do people do bad things? Sometimes I don’t want to do a bad thing, but I keep doing the bad thing. I love Jesus. I asked him to make me a saint.
We’ve got our work cut out for us, I try to tell her. Saints love God with their whole hearts and want to be with him.
I want to be with Jesus now! she says. We’re not ready yet, I say.
Her little brother sometimes echoes this desire. Why can’t we see Jesus now? I want to be with him.
Questions of schools and careers—of ballet and piano and arithmetic and Latin on the way to reading Shakespeare and learning civics and seasons and then becoming a teacher, mother, construction worker, shopkeeper, missionary—suddenly seem insignificant, pale and wan matters beside this most ultimate of questions. We are called to be saints, we’re told. And if saints want to be with Jesus, why not now?
The next question, the question they may not know how to ask until they’re older, is, Why do we exist at all?
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Vocation, vocatio, is a calling. Vocare means “to call”; from vocis we have “voice.” Evoke comes from e– —“out of, from”—and vocare.
We were each of us called out—from nothing, from emptiness, from non-being into being, by the Voice of Love. In T. S. Eliot’s haunting rephrasing in Little Gidding from The Cloud of Unknowing: We are drawn out by “this Love and the voice of this Calling.”
Why cannot we then live with Love, face to face, in a Garden? Why cannot we answer this call?
Because something happened there. Something was broken. Oh, child, this is a hard saying. Who can understand it?
We are children of the Most High. But we are slaves. We need to be rescued. But first we need to know that we are slaves.
“Out of Egypt I called my son.” The sons and daughters of Israel came out of slavery, but how long they had to wander in the wilderness before they were ready for the land of promise. But not ready even then. How scandalous is the history of Israel. How often they lost heart, lost faith. How like them we are.
Didn’t they know that they were called out to be changed, to be transformed? Didn’t they know they were called out to die?
What good does anything serve in this life, except that it purify and prepare our souls for resurrection?
The Norse peoples, with their praise of a good death, got some things right. But how can I explain to my daughter that we are here to learn to die well?
I turn for guidance to Blessed Julian of Norwich—“Mother Juliana,” as T. S. Eliot knew her, as he was writing Little Gidding, the last of his Four Quartets. She knew that each one of us has to die to ourselves, and so she asked God to strike her with sickness in order to purify her soul in this life—to be “purged [by] the mercy of God.”
What good does anything serve in this life, except that it purify and prepare our souls for resurrection?
But before resurrection, there must be death. We know this from how a seed must die before becoming a tree—what it was meant after all to be.
After a good death, then: more life.
For “to make an end is to make a beginning.” The start of the final section of T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding echoes the first sentence of East Coker: “In my beginning is my end,” a refrain that by the end becomes “In my end is my beginning.” And so begins the consummation of the music in this last passage of Little Gidding, revealing the underlying unity of beginning and end:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
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Could I tell my daughter this? “The end is where we start from.” “What we call the beginning is often the end.” Be a saint. Love God with your whole heart. This is your end, so let’s start on the path. Awake, and let us be on our way.
And when you’ve arrived, you’ll find that it’s only the beginning.
Or I could show her the yew tree.
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In Antiquities and Curiosities of the Church (1897), T. N. Brushfield notes that though the ancients viewed the yew—that tree of the poisonous leaves and seeds—as a symbol of death, to early Christians, “death was the harbinger of life,” so the yew and cypress both could not be used “as an emblem of their dying for ever.” Rather the symbol of death became the symbol of deathlessness, “an emblem of immortality, and to show his belief in the life beyond the grave,” the early Christian would cultivate “the yew in all the burying grounds of those who died in the new faith.”
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
The best human fathers, mothers, friends, and lovers each reveal a different facet of love, but they are only echoes of the real thing—flickering lamps to God’s brilliant sun.
It is love that we must die into—Love which “is itself unmoving, / Only the cause and end of movement” (Burnt Norton). It is both the places of stillness, of (spiritual) rest, and also the goal, the aim, of all our movement, and of God’s movement toward us.
So splendid and enormous love is that though the best human fathers, mothers, friends, and lovers each reveal a different facet of love, they can all only be echoes of the real thing—flickering lamps to God’s brilliant sun.
Julian, fully aware that sin, evil, and suffering mark our life here, reports Jesus’s words that “all shall be well.” Jesus, she reports, “will that we wit that all shall turn us to worship and to profit, by the vertue of his passion. And that we wit that we suffered right naught alone, but with him, and see him our ground.” Julian does not present this as her own theory, but as what she has been given. She does not claim to understand how this all works: she urges only that we “leave the beholding of a wretch that it was shewed to; and mightily, wisely, and meekly, behold in God, that of his courtesie, love, and endless goodness, would shew it generally in comfort of us all.” She desires that we know of God’s love, that we be comforted, that we do not give in to despair or sloth. She does not claim to understand how Love himself will bring glory out of misery, good out of evil, beauty out of error.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
“The voice of the hidden waterfall / And the children in the apple-tree” prefigure the impartation, “Quick now, here, now, always—A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)”—a description that serves very well for the saint. To be a saint—this is what is needed, “now, here, now, always.”
The poet too, in order to see truly, ought to aim for humility, to seek, like Julian, “A condition of complete simplicity.” So we live, we write, we love, as pilgrims, knowing and trusting that we will be “redeemed from fire by fire.”
At the conclusion of Little Gidding, Eliot echoes Julian again:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Beyond the fires of suffering, regeneration, and illumination comes oneness: the unity experienced only by the beatified, who, having come to their end, are at their beginning, and “know the place for the first time.” They are the ones who are awake, having been drawn by Love and drawn breath from Love’s air.
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Quick now, child. Let us enter the fire, and be changed.
Tessa Carman writes from Mount Rainier, Maryland.