Joyfully Giving Thanks

Today was exquisite.

(exquisite is a nice word, don't you think?)

Half our group piled in our coach and travelled two hours to Little Gidding, a tiny town of about four buildings tucked in the countryside among fields dotted with fuzzy white sheep.

I know, but it gets better.

For the first time in days we breathed in deep breaths of full, fresh air as we walked into the Ferrar House Retreat Center through the garden. Nice ladies smiled and greeted us and offered us tea and biscuits :) Many young Americans experienced shortbread cookies for the first time today. When the cups were cleared Graham Fawcette, the amiable father of our tour guide and guest speaker, began reading the parts of T. S. Eliot's Quartets poem, written while Eliot stayed at the very garden we were. Mr. Fawcett, as he explains it, speaks in prose. His words have the rare and valuable quality of breathing life and warmth into that of which he speaks, enchanting the most ordinary sentences into color, luring his listeners to step into his world of poetry. As president of the T.S. Eliot society and a professor of many years he knows what he is talking about.


Class in the sunshine

We would spend an hour in class, reading the poem out loud, discussing what it meant, our reactions, practicing "stepping into" the poem as one would step into a church, each stanza a room to explore. Then we would have a ten minute break to traipse around the garden, run on the lawn, take pictures, some people even tried eating the crab-apples. Then it was a home-cooked lunch, a fantastic dessert, class outside on the sunny lawn, the breeze blowing off the fields into our hair and then in the old chapel, where our words echoed off the stone, making us sound much more intelligent than we probably are.

My favorite lines are from part I,

"If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more 
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. 
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. 
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment 
Is England and nowhere. Never and always."


Mr. Fawcett says that as we step into poems they become our own, and I agree with this. Never before Have I been able to express exactly how I feel about prayer, and this is it. It is when I submit, rest, look up, let go, give respect, praise, honor, fear, become holy, set myself aside, take up a new commission... timeless and placeless. :)


Me in the garden :)

It was a day of sun, dirt, a full blue sky! Fresh air, flowers, growth, exploration, friends, beauty, silence, peace, communion, strength, love. We needed today. :)

For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. 
Col. 1:9-12.

 I love you!