During my early higher education, T. S. Eliot was popular in literature classes. Students often chose from his works at forensic tourneys, especially passages from The Waste Land, sometimes, The Hollow Men. In another poem he wrote: Our beginnings never know our ends. That may be the case for most persons, but it doesn’t apply to all. Perhaps if I had a conversation with Eliot during his lifetime, I might say that given the context of his writing, the sentence would stand. In the context of my lifetime, it does not stand without some modification. Of course I did not see much of what would comprise my life until now, at ninety-plus years of age. I am writing about it to students and family. By the time I graduated from high school I had a broad concept of what I wanted in the end, and would work for. It worked out, grander and larger than I had imagined, but it happened. I am content. I believe all those who give sufficient thought and energy to the matter can have some insight relative to their end. If by beginnings Eliot meant infancy and toddler periods he was correct, but he would not use his poetry for the obvious. We can know more, and work in clear direction, even in youth if we give time and search to it. Delay to maturity and direction in so many lives spells later disappointment and regret, usually with some loss of time in which human life is formed.
Many of the great authors give me pause in that I exult in their mastery of language, and prowess with words, but are they only reflecting the darker side of themselves in so many instances? The effects of warfare made Ambrose Bierce a cynic in his writings. Eliot was so burdened with health care for his wife that he lost a sense of his own balance, and appears outwardly to have been negative about himself. Hemingway and his friends in Paris, after World War I, were obsessed with alcoholism, sexual distractions, and various tethers in their lives. The list grows long. Why were so many taken with their literature to describe the negative spirit of life? These persons, in their talents, may have sometimes robbed from their readers more than they contributed. One of the magnificent concepts of Christianity is that no matter how experience develops in life, it is temporary in both the pleasant and the unpleasant to the ultimate transition. I have many factors in my life that I am thankful for to the ultimate of human gratification. These include life itself, my family, the years of professional participation, the respect of those around me, the length of life to be a part of the lives of generations – and so the story goes. There is a funny feeling of blessing to have lived to see three of my four children arrive at the age of retirement with the last one not far distant from that transition. Little wonder that God accented the blessing of long life with his management.
Concepts of immortality mingle during earthly sojourn, for Christian and non-Christian. Factors grow, becoming more mature in years of cultivation. For some there are detours of speculation that seem fanciful and unreal. Some will have their pets, they will even enjoy repasts by a great river – hammocks are popular. If families have been dutiful, we conjure family life in some elevated pattern. In likelihood, none of this nature life is likely to even be remembered much less expanded. Heaven will be real, and follow a kind of logic that does not admit of mistakes or wrongness. Love will prevail. Truth will have no opposite, which means good (right) will face no evil (wrong). The earth experience as we have it, pleasant for those who manage in the context of God’s graces, will not only be over, it will be forgotten. The new is so much greater that there will be no regret to have given up mortality for immortality. It will be as easy to do as it was to give up the life of the womb for the life of external nature. The person of faith, as experienced through the person of Jesus Christ, relies on the ultimate benefit of the presence of God in the promise of that which is future. Much of all this is gibberish to many secular minds, tied as they are to nature and verifiable evidence to conclusions. Denial that there may be other contexts of truth outside nature is part of the human tendency. It has always been a problem, handled poorly in every age, often with doubt and denial. As we would not imagine nature, if we did not know it, neither will we imagine a life beyond nature, while in nature, if it is not revealed and found to be useful not only for that which is to come, but practical for here and now. But we have it revealed – so to Scripture for review. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020