The Four Quartets of Middle Earth

I want you to imagine our recent pilgrimage through the Middle East (or Middle Earth) as a journey through “four quartets” (to use T.W. Eliot’s image). Our travels took us through the first quartet, Lebanon, the second, Syria, the third, Israel, and the fourth, Jordan. If you set these up as a grid, taking a square and dividing it into four blocks—the upper left block is Lebanon (1), the upper right block is Syria (2), the lower left, is Israel (3), and the lower right is Jordan (4)—which is the order we explored these quartets. And if you imagine the left half (1 and 3) to be “occidental” in nature, and the right half (2 and 4) to be “oriental” in nature, you would begin to have a feel for what we experienced.

These divisions, though somewhat arbitrary, actually do, in fact, correspond to a cultural and historical reality that we find reflected even in our most ancient spiritual and biblical texts. The Abrahamic faiths, and in particular Christianity, exhibits just these characteristic features—an upper and lower “occidental” nature, and an upper and lower “oriental” nature. As we traveled, I realized that in some interesting way we were, in fact, recapitulating and experiencing these aspects in real time as “flavors” of our own faith tradition.

I will explain this in subsequent entries, but for now imagine that the Christian West and the Christian East are like two halves of historic Christianity, and that their division from one another has run like a fissure throughout history and the faith. There differences are real and holding them together (like one might imagine the right and left hemispheres of the brain) makes a complete whole through which one can both think and experience a larger totality. It felt like that to me, and I was glad that we experienced the four in that order so there was plenty of comparison and contrast, not only between the various countries, but also between the historic and even current aspects of our faith. For me, at least, to see it through this lens made the trip metaphorically full as we traversed this sacred ground of “middle earth.”