Recognize Potential For Rebirth
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images …”
- T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”
In the early part of this century, T.S. Eliot wrote these words. Since then, countless people, in public and private, have used his metaphor of the wasteland to express their feelings about the world they lived in.
Recently I was visiting with a young friend, 19, who had just discovered Eliot’s poem in a college class. My friend said, “He could have been writing about today, all the crime, the drugs, divorce, no one really loves anyone. I feel like Eliot’s talking to my world.”
In Eliot’s day, there was a world war that had decimated Western culture’s foundations, an industrial revolution that made people into cogs in machines, and, in Eliot’s view, a modern diminishment of spirituality that made life a wasteland.
The world looked so grim to Eliot he began the poem with the line “April is the cruelest month” so that no one would mistake his meaning: Spring, the time of joyful potential, had become, for him, a time of cruel pain. Writing onward from that first line he sought to find what the story of Jesus promises every Easter - rebirth. By the end of the poem, he did find it. From the world of ashen emptiness he showed us the rebirth of soul.
As I contemplate the Easter season, and in the face of my young friend’s enthusiastic discovery of Eliot’s work, I find myself wondering what rebirths are occurring in our own personal wastelands this April, what new worlds are rising out of our personal ashes. April and the Easter season are a time to look within at what is growing inside each of us every day.
I know a woman who has felt desperate to be loved by her children who are grown up and pay little attention to her. She feels the same desperation in many parts of her life, pleasing people whenever she can. She lets others speak over her. She apologizes constantly. She feels unsafe in herself when others around her are not happy. She feels constantly like a victim.
This Easter season she decided to change many of these patterns. For her, too, it happened as a relationship ended. Her husband died in November. As she has recovered from his passing, gotten into therapy, taken a leave from her job, she has discovered a great deal about herself. She has let go of desperation. She has begun to regain, in her words, “that wonderful person God made.” She has found in a wasteland of pain and grief a new self-love.
This Easter I am searching in myself for what parts of me need to die away and what parts need to be reborn. I search for these things by focusing on specific issues and behaviors I am ready to let go of. I notice my attitudes toward money, work, other people, my family, public policies. Whenever I note in myself a desperation to have more money, to be No. 1, to judge other people before they judge me, to negatively control my family members, I step back and notice in all this that I am being ruled by a fear of not being loved enough. In that fear I notice that I do not love myself enough.
Toward the end of one of his later poems, “Little Gidding,” Eliot wrote, “We are born with the dead.” Indeed we are. Easter helps us notice the ashes around us, embrace the dying around us, and then see the new life that wants to emerge. My hope for everyone today is the hope that lies, I believe, in the heart of Jesus’ message: Be alive and passionate and full of conviction and, most of all, recognize your potential to be reborn, anew, when you need to be.
xxxx
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Michael Gurian The Spokesman-Review