Jesus in January

Blog | John Bale

When T.S. Eliot (finally) converted in 1929, it was a cultural scandal of monumental proportions. This was the equivalent of Steve Jobs coming to Christ and declaring that the iPhone is “really not that big of a deal…” This was David Foster Wallace getting baptized and finishing The Pale King instead of hanging himself. Nobody wanted to, and few were even capable of believing that Eliot had become a Christian. He was the Judas Iscariot of the Lost Generation.

To this day there are doubters who resist the authenticity of his faith because it was often “inglorious” in its earnest betrayal. They argue that, because Eliot’s late work didn’t rehash the pageantry Christmas carols or the somber religion of Easter hymns- because his conversion didn’t turn a 40-year-old man into a saint overnight, it didn’t count.

They fail to recognize that T.S. Eliot wrote about Jesus in January. He concedes December and April to The Lord and His Apostles, because “it [was already] finished.” His work addresses a life of crisis in between the holidays- where Christians are still human and Christ is still honest; we struggle, we suffer, and we sin, but yet we are saved.

The need for Jesus in January has been made clear to me in a particular Eliot poem that I have been rereading this past Advent season. In it we see how he struggles with the mystery of Christmas in times when the Cross is hard to see through all the snow storms (or fog, in San Diego) that come when winter hits mid-stride. The poem is called “The Journey of the Magi,” and if interested you can read the full text [here].

The poem recounts the story of the Magi/Three Wise Men/Three Kings of Orient as reported in Matthew 2:1-12, but from the perspective of a reminiscing magi. It is now somewhere around 30 years after the Nativity (Hint! Hint!), and the curmudgeony old man tells the story more like a rambling drunk at last call than a wizened Eastern astrologer. He goes on for several lines about the misery of their task, all the folly, and pretty much skips the Nativity itself. Been there- Done that. “Finding the place,” he says, “it was (you may say) satisfactory.”

Then, these hauntingly insightful lines make the text worth reading:

Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

This is the confession of a man who had spent his entire life figuring out the Universe. He traveled to the opposite end of the known world in search of something New, and found it. But, as we see, he spends the rest of his days unable to figure out exactly what he’d seen.
The paradoxical problem is this: How can something so “simple” as an infant’s birth unravel the connecting relationship between Life and Death (life and death)?

Throughout the whole journey, this man who was a master of asking questions and finding answers, had been asking himself, “What will we see?” When he gets there, he sees something, and it is “satisfactory” as an answer to the simple question, but confounding in the sense that it was an Answer to questions he hadn’t asked. We have to remember that the magi were not looking for Jesus. Historians think that they were Zoroastrian astrologers. They were following a star. It’s what they did. They came upon Birth by accident, following a light through the darkness like a baby out of a womb. Christ, appearing as a lamb, ambushed them like a tiger.

Faced with the prospect of having an Answer to a Question that they didn’t know to ask was stifling, and in Eliot’s interpretation, made wise men feel like fools.

But this is a core tenant of The Gospel: Christ was born into the Earth because all of our work to justify ourselves and glorify God, to have the right answers to the right questions, is all folly. We define ourselves by the things we have done, and seen, and said- but all of this is covered up by the Nativity. An infant can’t do a whole lot more than sit there and “live,” but something about this infant’s Living casts a shadow upon the sum total of human efforts. Our journey through life no matter how arduous, counts for nothing in light of the fact that Christ was born, died, and lived.

Nobody wants to be told that their life’s work counts for nothing. But eventually every person must come to terms with the fact that it might actually be true. This is murder to our Pride. For us, the magi, and T.S. Eliot, the Birth of a Christ who comes without asking for our permission, consent, or agreement awakens us to our inadequacy. And our frailty feels like death.

But it’s even worse than that. The conviction that awakening brings on existential crisis. If a simple birth, no matter how momentous a Birth, discounts all human effort, what toil have we left while living? What are we supposed to do with ourselves? The last line of the poem suggests an impotent kind of nihilism; having been properly confused by the fact that a Birth has made him feel the bitter agony of his own mortality, the magi is unsure what it means to Live, or if he has ever done such a thing.

So he longs for death. But that answer doesn’t stand up to next to the Answer. He can’t find peace because he has started to understand that living and dying (Living and Dying?)- his very existence is outside of his control.

So then the Question is “How do we Live?” and this brings us/Eliot/the magi back to Christ once more: The irresistible glory of the Gospel narrative, from Nativity to Resurrection, is that Christ submitted himself to the two things that a man cannot resist: birth and death. We cannot choose to be born and we cannot chose not to die. Christ, by the power of His Father took salvation out of the hands of man using the same means by which Existence imposes itself upon our souls.

For Eliot, spiritual and existential crises become one and the same- an encounter with Christ’s Birth makes him realize that he had never lived. Yet, there is a hope that lies below the surface when a geriatric magi contemplates the “glad[ness] of another death.” That “other death,” the Death of Christ on the Cross, is subtly foreshadowed in the poem:

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Life- literal living creatures surround an image of the Crucifixion. This is how T.S. Eliot (begrudgingly) defers to the sovereignty of God’s saving Grace. He admits to himself that in Christ’s Birth, his own death is sealed. Yet he looks forward to the other half of the most perfect couplet- a knowledge that in Christ’s Death, his own Birth is assured.

Eliot’s conversion, the realization of his Birth, was a long and gradual Journey. But it had integrity. He was a Prophet among prophets in “those Kingdoms… in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods.” He had a lot to lose in gaining Christ, but once he did, he couldn’t go back. He had resisted Grace before his Baptism, and he struggled with it well afterwards, obsessively and anxiously “working out his salvation with fear and trembling” (and a deadly amount of nicotine.)

Two truths ring true in “Journey’s” Life and Death struggle: Not only does Eliot recognize that, because Christ was born, all his life’s work is meaningless, but also that, because Christ died, all His work in our lives’ has meaning, whether we accept it, or not. A constant refrain in his later work is a prayer for stillness, which is a good prayer because it concedes to the passive nature of man’s role in his own salvation.

In the stillness that comes when we are too tired to resist, those of us who are assured of our salvation can see that all of our sins, doubts, and failures are already conquered- accounted for within the scope of Invincible Grace. We can resist it only so far as the Sunset Cliffs resist the Pacific Ocean; every granular mite of rebellion, over time, and with all measure of certainty, is sculpted into a lasting monument to the sovereignty of the sea. T.S. Eliot’s life and work are baptized in the wake of this Grace.

Eliot binds his moment of crisis to a time that is two thousand years removed, though slightly before the scandalous climax of The Gospel, in order to remind himself that all of his sinful wanderings are nothing more than ancient history. While living in a constant fear of a meaningless moment, he mortifies his doubt by fixing upon one glorious moment that, for him, can never be in doubt. Jesus happened. End of story.

It’s not the kind of miraculous conversion story we all love, but this tale is also worth telling. It still demonstrates the transcendent Hope and Peace, and perhaps even more so, the Glory in The Gospel. Furthermore, it is earnest in its confession, humble in its spirit, and thankGodfully true. Even in January.