Little Gidding

It’s gone all misty-cold here again in our part of the world, but this past weekend we were blessed with one of the customary miracles of a Southern winter: three days of sunshine and warmth that whispered secrets of April to our hearts. Neighbors came out of hiding in shorts and tee-shirts and songbirds split the air for joy. Puck and the sheep ruminated drowsily in a sunlit pasture and I napped on the windowseat in a wash of western light that felt like the luxury of high summer. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed the sun till it came out in a glory, sparking an answering lifting and lightness in my soul. What a boon and promise, bookended though it was with chill and drizzle and grey. Winter is back, now, as it should be in its season, but our hearts are strengthened to believe in spring.

Days like that always make me think of T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding and the opening comment on ‘mid-winter spring’. And that, inevitably, minds me of Little Gidding, itself, and the grace-laden afternoon in May we once spent there. I looked it up in my journal just to live it again. Here’s a little extract:

Our destination was Little Gidding, ‘way over in Cambridgeshire. We went on merrily enough, despite the rain that was beginning to sprinkle the windscreen and the prospect of navigating Stratford, Warwick and Coventry. Just outside of Stratford we bought some freshly-picked strawberries at a roadside stand.

“No need to wash them,” the woman at the till cheerfully informed me, “I picked them myself just this morning and we never use any spray.”

I am hereby entirely spoiled for life in that quarter: surely we have nothing so luscious in the States as a freshly-picked English strawberry.

We found Little Gidding itself without too much trouble, regardless of the fact that it’s quite literally in the middle of nowhere: ‘behind the pig-sty’, indeed! And though we didn’t approach the ‘dull façade’ from the front but from the rear, it was exactly as I expected it to be, set peacefully and placidly amid the gentle undulations of the Cambridgeshire countryside with frothy white hawthorn edging the pasture before it and the ancient graves in the green churchyard leaning crazily against one another like old men having a confidential chat. I was sorry that it was raining, but it was such a soft, friendly little shower I really couldn’t begrudge it—just one of those very English saturations, really.

We stepped into the tiny building in a reverent silence and looked about us in a dimness unspoilt by electricity. There was seating for about thirty in the two short stalls lining each side and at the far end the light came clear and pure from tall, unadorned windows. The stone floor was uneven, and there were faded Scriptural mottoes painted in friezes about the room, mostly in Latin. Someone had stitched four banners with the words of Eliot, Ferrar and Herbert, and in the simple, white plaster nave beneath the arching windows were brazen plaques bearing the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Apostles Creed, all in Old English.

I knelt at the rail, savoring the exquisite peace of the place ‘where prayer has been valid’ for so many centuries, thanking God for that blessed communion of saints and clouds of witness that enfold every believer at every moment but which are so tremendously touchable and present in a place and at a time such as this. Then I sat silently beside Philip in one of the stalls, looking about and printing it all upon my memory—most especially the indefinable yet pervasive sense of purity and simplicity that yet seems to cling like a fragrance to this ancient Christian fellowship. Almost like a 17^th century L’Abri, as I remarked to Philip later. After we’d been in the church for a while, we noticed that the rain had stopped and the birds outside were singing more jubilantly than ever. I stepped to the door and breathed deeply of the hawthorn-scented air which was distilled with such a gentle radiance, all freshness and the sweetness of England. We realized we’d hardly spoken a word while we were in the church…

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

from Little Gidding, by T.S. Eliot