I ramble a little below, but it has all been said by TS Eliot – and exquisitely – in his Four Quartets. So I have (yet again) begun a cycle of recording of these poems. The first of the four – Burnt Norton – is in the link below.

I have been reflecting on meaning. I man convinced of a timeless wonder and purpose within which this material universe is a part. I am fortunate because I have experienced fleeting transcendent bliss, the sense that “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”. I believe that the way of knowing this is not through logic, or algorithm – but direct experience of infinite loving other within people, nature and God. Why then do we think? Why speak? What purpose does our human edifice of philosophy and mathematics serve?

I have recently glimpsed one possibility. Whilst I have always experienced deep connection to “all that is” within Christ (and not necessarily within any particular church), I have had a rational stumbling block which I have recently resolved. Christ said “I am the way, the truth and the life. Except by me shall no man come to the Father”. How can that be? What about those before, and who are brought up in different traditions? What about Hindus and Buddhists, who I am sure access the same truth? My resolution is simple. I have come to see that it is the moments of epiphany and connection wherein reality lies. Those moments – quoting Martin Buber – of “I-Thou” rather than “I-It” living. What Christ meant I believe is that he embodied the I of I-Thou or the point of connection. So that he could truthfully be at the same time human and fragmented AND the oneness that is all-that-is which some of us call God. When he said “I”, meant both “I” as frail human and “I” as God. This is one of those mysteries and paradoxes that our rationality can’t touch – just like the physical paradox of light being at the same time a wave and a stream of individual photons.

I reached this personal insight – which allows me properly to want to follow Christ – through conversations with my dying brother Christopher last year. (Thank you Chris x)

Anyway – Eliot says it all so well – and he of course also came to Christianity – expressed in The Four Quartets. His journey from the materialist and atheist despaire expressed The Wasteland, was also one of finding “the point” of the turning world as intersection through Chist of infinity with finite.