Little Gidding

Recently I have been working on the Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot in preparation for some of our work here in the Spring. It is an amazing piece of spiritual poetry. The last quartet is called “Little Gidding” and refers to a small, semi-monastic community of Anglicans that formed in response to the collapse of European institutions in and around the great Wars of the twentieth centuries.

In that setting a small community of individuals came into being that lived an interior life distinct from the formal institutions of the Church, and forged a way of being in the modern world that expressed reality and depth in contrast to the manifestations of religion “at the surface of things.”

Small and committed communities of individuals like Little Gidding are in some ways analogous to the experience of early Christianity. What we experience in these less formal but significant gatherings is the realization that it is neither society nor institutions that support spiritual life, but real encounters with real people, not en masse, but as individuals in their unique and hard won pilgrimages with whom we recapture access to the grace and beauty of the divine Presence in this world dominated and manipulated by human power.