To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
The King – Charles Stuart – retreated to Little Gidding at nightfall. His horse knew the way so well, off the rough road and behind the pigsty to the dull façade and tombstone. There, through a squall of May rain, he glimpsed the house and church and the familiar gleam of lamps and candles. John Ferrar, the master of that place, welcomed him as the King gazed wistfully at the hedges ringing the demesne, white now in spring with voluptuary sweetness.
They shared a meal of bread, cheese, and wine – Ferrar, the King, and Ferrar’s family. Knowing now that his capture was at hand, Charles abandoned his plots and schemes and told tales instead of previous trips to Little Gidding, long ago, before impious hands had risen up against him. Nicholas Ferrar, John's brother and the founder of the Community, had been alive back then, a man so nakedly holy that people and things – plants, stones, everything – shone with the light of Mount Tabor in his presence. 'I should have been more like your brother,' the King told Ferrar. Nicholas had been a prodigy of the age, a businessman and parliamentarian on the fast track to success in the new mercantile England. And he had tossed it all aside to establish this House of God. 'Your brother,' said the King, 'saw through illusion and pretence and stored up treasure in Heaven, whereas I, too often, have failed to discriminate between the two and so have lost my treasure.'
Afterwards, in church, they sang the Psalter, songs of praise and lamentation by another king – David – who had likewise been struck down by fate, the obduracy of his enemies, and his own moral and spiritual failings:
‘Attend unto my cry; for I am brought very low; deliver me from my persecutors; for they are stronger than I. Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name.’
Charles wept. How had it come to this? What could he have done differently? Why had he been chosen, fragile as he was, to fight for hierarchy while everywhere the iconoclastic tide washed away time-hallowed conceptions of the sacred, drowning both past and present so that Mammon could own the future?
The Community retired to bed, but Charles stayed where he was as the tears rolled on – sobs of bitterness, impotence, rage, and loss. A barren emptiness pressed down upon his soul. He passed aimlessly through vast, untenanted, derelict cathedrals of the mind. Then out into the desert, a parched land of drought and jagged rocks. Shattered glass. Rusty knives. A heap of broken images. The whole great world ground down to nought.
He recalled how a travelling scholar, a Welshman, had told him once of the Greek belief that at the heart of every labyrinth – physical, mental, or spiritual – lay a monster who had to be slain before the ascent to the Sun could begin. The memory was intolerable to the King; the realisation that after so much suffering he had yet to arrive at a beginning. Then it happened. He felt, saw, and heard the monster twitch and uncoil at the core of his being – his own personal labyrinth. He screamed and fell forward on the floor, stretching out as if grasping for a handhold. But there was no hold, and no bottom to the King's fall. The veil between past and present was torn, and he lived again in every shabby detail the vacuity of his life and felt the sterile truth of it as never before, the rending pain of re-enactment and the shame of hidden motives now revealed. And still his fall continued – sheer, vertiginous, no-man fathomed.
So he called on Christ for help – 'Save me, Lord’ – the first time he had prayed from real inner need rather than vanity or pride, the first time he had trusted in God rather than his royal status, the first time he had been so pummelled and stripped and pulled to pieces that he had turned to Heaven like a child or a peasant and not as a king. But he had neither hope nor expectation of an answer. Charles was long past hope. All his life he had been hoping for solutions and fixes of one kind or another. Always hoping for the wrong thing. And then, he knew not why nor how, he was somehow falling up, not down. Strong hands were hauling him up through a sheet of scorching flame. He screamed again, and then he was out and free and restored in mind and body. Burnt clean. All in an instant. Gold and silver lit up his brain and there was light in his mind and music in his heart. ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ said a Voice. 'Rise up now like the Phoenix.’
The King stood up and looked around, but there was no-one there.
So he lit a candle and prayed before the statue of St. John the Divine. But not for himself. He had no need now, for He who had once sacked and plundered Hell had lifted him out of the labyrinth of self. He prayed instead for Little Gidding, invoking the Holy Spirit to descend upon it and illumine the hearts and minds of all who lived and worshipped there.
Charles saw into the future, shuddered, and begged that Little Gidding might one day be a national shrine, a place where motives are purified and where prayer will always be valid. He asked that the English might find refuge there in the winter of European civilisation and that poets find words to convey its essence to a world denuded of sacred sites and void of numinous terrain.
A beacon in the night. A light unto the nations. A midwinter spring.