April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
—T. S. ELIOT
These opening lines from Eliot’s The Waste Land arouse rather strong feelings in me every year about this time, equal parts despair and longing. The Montana landscape, having slipped its whited veil, stands now bare in its state of death, in grimy tinted light caused by dense nimbostrati seemingly hell-bent on preventing the sun’s life from kissing the sleeping earth.
For Montanans—as for Eliot in The Waste Land—the month of April is a potent metaphor for what we might call “the modern predicament.” In a later poem entitled The Hollow Men, Eliot writes that “Modern” and “Enlightened” humanity has succeeded in filling itself to the brim, indeed stuffing itself—but with straw. The real boy has reverted to scarecrow. We are “Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” For all our technological advances and comfortable improvements, still we find ourselves (perhaps all the more) impotent, apathetic, empty—living in what Eliot calls “death’s other kingdom.”
Turning to the Self
How have we come to this? In a most haunting of phrases, Eliot hints at his answer: “Lips that would kiss / Form prayers to broken stone.” The living dead have traded the love expressed in a kiss for the death whispers of idol pleading. For, as the psalmist of Psalm 115 says, these idols “have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see” (v. 5). Indeed, we are the broken stone. (Ps. 115:8). The turn to idols is the turn to the self as god, which is the turn to the self as nothing.
It is nothingness, make no mistake; but we Moderns know it by another name: “freedom.” We fancy ourselves gods just so far as we are “free,” by which we mean a will constrained by no one and aimed at no thing, save that it might determine itself. Like Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Into the Heart of Darkness, we want to answer to no one “either high or low”; we want nothing “above or below” us; we want to “kick [ourselves] loose of the earth.”
Becoming Hell to Each Other
Modern technology and comforts are so much smoke and so many mirrors. They give the illusion that our wills are the determination of reality. There is one problem, however (and our own nation is dealing with it in spades currently). There are countless others who likewise have kicked themselves loose. So unmoored from their natural abode, humans don’t mount heavenward, they become hell to each other as so many inhabitants of “Greytown.”
It is just here that, perhaps, the despair of April may be for us the tilling for May flowers. The danger with Greytown is that its inhabitants–with smoke and mirrors–may hoodwink themselves that they are as a matter of fact elsewhere. Despair is not a particularly pleasant kind of awareness, but it is awareness. And for those chasing the wind, the awareness of the dreary sky, a barren earth, of our own nakedness, is an achievement—like pain felt in the finger feared frostbitten.
Awakening Hope out of Our Darkness
So here we slouch in April in Montana. Here we sit in the midst of Lent. And awareness begins to invade: awareness of our own heart of darkness, of our own wretched body of death. And so also awareness of the need for our own confession and repentance (as Lewis noted: “Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others”).1
We ask with Bonaventure, “O stubborn heart, insane and irreverent, why is it that in your misery you laugh and rejoice like a madman, while the Wisdom of the Father weeps over you?”2 Most importantly, we begin to be aware of our true life beyond our self. “Behold the grief of him who brings you healing,” continues Bonaventure.
It may just be that April isn’t “the cruellest month.” Every so often, the sun breaks through. The robin’s distant song returns, and with it the memory of a future insurgence. In April, Lent brings Good Friday, yes, and Good Friday brings Easter Sunday. In April, God does indeed make lilacs to grow from this “dead land.” In April, the awareness of despair bathes every vein, as Chaucer has it, producing the longing of hope.
I admit this is a fairly morbid reflection. Why reflect on our own turn to the self and its subsequent death? What’s the alternative? Distracting ourselves from its reality? Stupefying ourselves with smoke and mirrors? Sure, this reflection is morbid. But “the alternative,” remarks Lewis, “is much more morbid” still.3
1“Miserable Offenders,” in God in the Dock, 120-125, cited 124.
2“The Tree of Life” in The Works of Bonaventure, trans. José de Vinck, vol. I (Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1960), 113.
3“Miserable Offenders,” 124.