Welcome back to Young Heretics for our second episode on TS Eliot's four quartets.

Last episode, we were talking about time.

This episode, I want to talk about God.

So the quartets, just as a reminder, these are the four poems that make up the last great work of TS Eliot's life.

He has converted at this point in 1927 to Anglican Christianity,

and his work has taken a dramatic turn for the hopeful and the joyous,

but not in the way that you might expect.

When you hear those words, you tend to hear those words and think, you know, some smiley happy talk,

the version of Christianity that doesn't acknowledge suffering or sin or deal with the problem of pain,

that is not, or dealing with here in Eliot.

And in fact, I'm going to argue in this episode that it is profoundly the opposite of what we're dealing with.

That Eliot's vision of God in these poems is based centrally on his idea of the suffering of Christ

and the reality of suffering in the world through which we peer into the heart of God.

I've already sort of hinted at some of this in the previous episode,

this idea that if you actually invest deeply in what our experience is,

that if you don't shy away from the gruesomeness and the weirdness of it and the reality,

you will look deep into something that is much more profound and stretches beyond your own present moment

into the patterning of the cosmos and the arc of justice in God's,

universe in God's history and God's salvation story.

So that is what we're going to be digging back into now in these poems.

As we revisit them, we could do 20 episodes on four quartets.

We honestly, we could just do a whole podcast on four quartets forever and ever.

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