Day: May 29, 2022

“The end of all things is at hand”

The spectre of “endism” hangs over us – an ominous presence of foreboding and despair in our current age. It is an endemic feature of our fragmented world in the sense of the collapse of cultures and institutions that belong to human flourishing and dignity. This is the dominant form of fear that is with us. A deeper fear than the fear of Covid-19, it is the pandemic of fear itself, a fear of death and of the end of the world. “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper” as T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men puts it, though perhaps with both a bang and a whimper, we fear.

One hundred years ago, in 1922, T.S.Eliot wrote The Waste Land, his poem on the wilderness of modernity. Composed of five sections, the first one is entitled The Burial of the Dead, an explicit reference to the Prayer Book Burial Office. It presents a telling image of a world and church in ruins.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree give no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you,
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The images of death and decay are drawn from the poet-prophet of the Exile, Ezekiel, and from Ecclesiastes, the poet-philosopher of the Hebrew Scriptures. Son of man, ben adam, taken from Ezekiel, alludes to our common humanity and to Christ but also to our uncertainties about life and death. “You” – we – “cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images.” That, too, is from Ezekiel: “and your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken” (Ezekiel 6.4). His world, too, was a world of ruin and fragmentation, of loss and exile on Babylon’s strand.

It all seems so dark and ominous, so negative and dystopian. Yet the poem offers more than despair and darkness, more than fear and death, and again as drawn from Scripture and as belonging to the life of the Church in all times and all places. It is found in the idea of “com[ing] in under the shadow of this red rock,” an allusion to Isaiah 32.1-2: “a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment./And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” The images belong to God and his Providence.

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