Introducing Mud and Sapphires

Because Christ Makes Even the Mud Holy

Photo by Jonathan Lampel on Unsplash

T. S. Eliot was wrong about one thing – May is a far crueler month than April. The azaleas have all bloomed out, and the sameness of the landscape matches the sameness of the weather. The moist Florida heat blankets us; hot day follows hot day, punctuated only by three o’clock thunderstorms. School continues, and we crawl our way to the finish line with a flurry of performances, play-offs, and potlucks. It is neither spring nor summer; time seems misaligned. Each season has its own beauty. Summer is by far my least favorite, but at least it has its benefits: leisurely mornings, afternoons at the pool, and the general sense of hopefulness as I plan for the school year to come. But the relentless in-betweenness buries beauty. May is the month of perseverance and waiting. It is May that mixes memory and desire.

We may have differing opinions about the month of April, but I am captivated by Eliot’s poetry. His language is mesmerizing, weaving together the cryptic and the profound. I return often to his Four Quartets, a masterful set of four poems published over a six-year period. “Burnt Norton”, the first of the four, is named after a manor home in Gloucestershire. The poem introduces a reflection on time, a theme throughout the series. Then, the second section begins abruptly with an enigmatic description in sharp juxtaposition to the laughter in the manor’s rose garden. He writes:

Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars Appeasing long forgotten wars.

Once the book is closed, the striking imagery of sapphires laying in the mud remains in my memory. So much of my life feels like dropping – or even burying – the costly and the beautiful in the mud of life. Precious time and talents feel wasted upon things that seem mundane or without value. While I juggle homeschool, graduate school, and a household, I must mop the floor. The only result is a clean floor upon which to spill milk; an hour after finishing it already needs doing again. At other times, in seasons of hardship and grief, life seems to be a search, rooting through the mud trying to find anything of value.

These two – the losing and the searching, the mundane and the acute – are both a form of suffering. I have known more than seems to be my fair share of the sort of things one thinks of as suffering: illness, death, loss, and betrayal. Then there is the other kind of suffering – quotidian suffering – the out-of-placeness one feels, longing for heaven while stuck on earth. They vary in occasion and degree. What both have in common are hiddenness and privation. Thrice Eliot mentions hiddenness in “Burnt Norton”. Music, laughter, and children remain hidden in the shrubbery of the garden. These are good and beautiful things. This is not the despair of disbelief in the existence of good, but sorrow as it remains concealed. Clear sight is a powerful antidote to both acute suffering and quotidian boredom.

Dante’s journey through the afterlife offers a paradigm for the link between sight and sanctification. His pilgrimage centers around straightening his will and developing his sight.  In the introduction to his translation of Purgatory, Anthony Esolen writes: “Man’s soul, like fire, seeks its home upward, in the realm of the stars. Hence it is that along with more crookedness comes blindness, and along with rectitude comes vision, the vision man had been created for all along.” Dante would not ultimately be able to behold the Beatific Vision in Paradise without clear, corrected vision. When he finally reaches Empyrean, he is ultimately unable to describe what he sees, a failure of the confines of language. However, he poetically describes his final state of sight:

And so my mind, suspended utterly, held its gaze still immobile and intent, and ever kindled was my wish to see. Before that Light one’s will to turn is spent

Like a blind man, my will to turn is not yet spent. Rather than developing a wish to see what is hidden, I view suffering as a thing to avoid or endure at best. Mud is but a nuisance to wash away. Yet Christ saw mud as a means of unveiling. In John’s Gospel Jesus mingles his saliva with dirt and uses this mud to heal a man born blind. The man then asks who Christ is so that he might believe. Jesus answers, “You have seen him.” The Pharisees engage in their usual jugglery, hoping to entrap the man’s parents into a confession about Christ. It is they who cannot see. Christ has just made the dirt sacramental.

Eliot concludes his reflection on being, memory, and time with an image of dust. He writes:

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage

This could be an image of insightful knowing, a thin place, a hope beyond the veil. But alas, it is not. The context for the laughter is a cynical moment; “Ridiculous the waste sad time,” he writes. I cannot fault him - How often am I guilty of the same? The arrogance to pick and choose what is “the waste sad time”. How tragic to polish moments that I deem to be sapphires and to discard the rest.  There is nothing wasteful or sad about laughter in the sunlit dust. I pray for that vision for which we were created while May, a month of quotidian sameness, inches by. I think about mud that creates sight. For Christ makes even the mud holy.