T.S. Eliot and the Need for Lent
Recent surveys indicate the decades-long ebb in religious observance has finally bottomed out. Last month, Pew Research released data indicating that the declining share of self-identified Christians in America has stabilized around 62 percent. Other surveys have found that young men especially are taking up more seats in the pews, with many seeking out the more traditional practices of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communions.
Why are Americans suddenly returning to tradition? Explaining her own conversion to Christianity, former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently asserted that the metaphysical and spiritual assumptions of secular liberalism seem too weak in this age of crisis. “Atheism failed to answer a simple question,” she wrote, “what is the meaning and purpose of life?” Christianity provides an account of the permanent things and humanity’s relationship to them that actually strengthens Ali and believers like her in struggles great and small.
The Church is a unique source of strength in the face of this modern boredom and despair for her ability to remake believers in the image of Christ’s life. Belief is not a cheap solution to life’s problems; as He told His disciples, “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” The season of Lent, which begins today with Ash Wednesday, is meant to prepare new converts and renew the faith of those already in the congregation “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and alms-giving; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” More than anything, it is these practices that converts, reverts, and indeed all Christians need for sustenance in these desiccated times.
A century ago, T.S. Eliot put this Lenten faith into poetry. Raised in a Unitarian home and educated at elite institutions where liberalism was fashionable, he nevertheless felt a gnawing hunger deep in his soul. After WWI, his modernist poetry used an experimental style to capture his disenchantment with the modern world. The Waste Land, the long poem which made Eliot into a literary celebrity in 1922, is nothing less than a cry of despair over the ruins of European civilization left in the wake of WWI.
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