This semester I was privileged,
yes privileged, to take a T.S. Eliot class from Brother Samuelson. It was a block class, which means that it’s
finals time for Mr. Eliot! For our final
project we could anything we wanted. We
just had to incorporate our interpretation of T.S. Eliot’s poetry or
drama.
In one class it was stated that T.
S. Eliot didn’t want people to put concrete things to his writing. He wanted readers to interpret his poetry
with their lives in mind.
This brought peace to my soul,
because when I was reading The Four Quartets
I couldn’t help but apply what Eliot was saying to my own life. For my final project I took lines and stanzas
from The Four Quartets (a collection of four poems) that stuck out
to me, and identified a time in my life when I experienced or learned the
lesson that Eliot expressed in his poem.
What happened was a blend of personal stories from my mission in
Chicago, Illinois. The Four Quartets are
woven into each story to create a beautiful melody of experiences and changes
that took place to me while I was serving the Lord.
This is my favorite part from my
stories. It’s about my thoughts and
feelings from my last Sunday in Illinois.
The excerpts are from The Dry
Salvage, the third poem in the collection.
Standing in warm March night air I realized my mission
wasn’t what I thought it was going to be a year and a half ago. I thought I’d be solitarily helping other
people. I thought I wouldn’t change at
all.
But I was wrong.
We had the experience
but missed the meaning
For one and a half years I had thought that I was there for
others, when in reality I was there so Heavenly Father could make me into the
woman that He needed me to be.
And approach to the
meaning restores the experience
He needed me to be a mother possessing patience and love.
He needed me to be a woman of acceptance, of compassion, of
service.
The only way that that was possible was through the
experience of my mission.
In a different form,
beyond any meaning,
We can assign to
happiness.
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