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.
I find the last lines of T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, the final poem of his Four Quartets, incredibly beautiful and evocative. I go back to them, at least in my mind, every Pentecost. He took the first two lines from Julian of Norwich’s Showings, a promise which she believed Christ had spoken to her directly in regard to her experience of the torment of guilt for her sin in the midst of a bodily sickness.
To Julian’s lines, Eliot added his own brief lines of promise in regard to the spiritual process of being purged as if by fire, that is by suffering. He sees that fire of pain and loss as “Pentecostal” (“tongues of flame”), thus holy, and ultimately redemptive as it is woven into the orderly and beautiful form of a crown knot, which evokes the image of a fiery rose.
Like much of Eliot’s poetry, Little Gidding is itself a complex knot of allusions and meanings. The title is the name of a small 17th century Anglican religious community that was dispersed in the Puritan revolt. But its church was rebuilt and restored in both the 18th and 19th centuries. That little community of faith has a literal history of suffering and redemption.
In my reading of the Pentecost text, Acts 2:1-21, and Eliot’s poem, the fire and the rose represent two aspects of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. There is a passionate, fiery, possibly even destructive aspect that calls us forward into new life, maybe even through purging and loss. But then there is the rosy, peaceful, ordering work of the Spirit who is called the Comforter, settling, building and establishing us in that new life which we may have entered, “as if by fire,” in pain and loss.
I also think that personality type may incline some of us more toward the fiery side of spiritual life while drawing others of us toward the rosy side of the Spirit. Yet both are part of God’s own Holy Spirit and both are necessary in us as individuals and in us as a church together.
First off, great post. I really enjoyed reading it.
My sister has often asked why she had to go through what she has. My mother told her “it’s what you do with those experiences that matters.” We are all shaped by our tribulations. We can let them beat us down, or we can build on them.
Thanks, Jacob. Yes, and part of what we need to do with those difficult experiences is to let the Spirit of God work in us to cleanse and change and to heal and reorder our lives in new ways. We are not responsible for all the redemptive work, but we are responsible for allowing the Spirit to work.
who is the artist for the beautiful rendering of “the firey rose”? I can’t read the name.
I’m sorry, but I do not know the name of the artist.