Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri on this day in 1888. Known better as “T.S.” both in this country and in England, Eliot exerted considerable influence on writers of his day as one of the leaders of the school of “New Criticism.”

I found him to be severe as a critic, but my opinion of him changed once I became familiar with his poetry. There I found a sensitivity I had not discovered elsewhere in his writing. He later became a deeply religious man who was discouraged about the loss of spiritual values in his day.

In his “Choruses from ‘The Rock'” he acknowledges the progress of science but he laments the fact that so little progress has been made in understanding ourselves before the God who created us and who calls us into a loving relationship to him:

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

T.S. Eliot’s poetic message for his day also seems to be appropriate for our day. Consider the continued puzzlement and shock over the shootings on school campuses that became notorious with Columbine High School. The media provides little evidence our society has been able to make sense of these tragedies or to understand why they occur. There is little recognition how God might be involved in our suffering or our losses or our sense of being overwhelmed. Eliot writes:

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to God.

We agonize over the violence and death among our children, I think, because it reminds us of our own violence and death as adults, of how transitory our lives are and, if you press far enough into society’s experience, of our own need to find life from the hands of a compassionate God. For all we have gained in our modern and sophisticated world, Eliot would say, we have lost the greatest gift of all:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T.S. Eliot questioned the direction of his culture in the early 20th-century, but his judgment seems just as applicable to our culture nearly one hundred years later:

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

T.S. Eliot also was a Harvard-trained philosopher, a successful banker and a respected publisher. He eventually moved to London and became an British citizen. He once described himself as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion. In 1948 he was awarded the Order of Merit by King George VI and was given the Nobel Prize in literature. He died in 1965. Happy birthday, T.S. Eliot!

Doug Rich is the pastor of Pioneer Presbyterian Church in Clatsop Plains in Warrenton.