Welcome to Old Books with Grace! Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent 2025. And today begins the Old Books with Grace Lent Series, on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Lent is a time of repentance, reflection, and reconciliation. These are actions that happen in time, facilitated by memory and love. So even though we, as followers of Christ, repent, reflect, and reconcile year-round, one hopes, we set aside a time to especially do so, to be as intentional as we can, to pay special attention to our blessed limitations as creatures of God. It is easy to let these things go.

This is what Lent is for. It so happens that these themes—love, memory, time, attention, repentance, creatureliness—are also themes extensively explored in T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece set of poems, the Four Quartets. Each episode in this Lent series, Grace will be discussing one of the quartets with a guest. Today is the first, Burnt Norton, and poet and editor Paul Pastor joins Grace for a lively discussion.

Paul J. Pastor is Executive Editor of Nelson Books at HarperCollins, an essayist, critic, and poet, writer of The Rose Fire on Substack, and author of several books, most recently The Locust Years: Poems, from Wiseblood Books. He lives in Oregon. 

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