In this year my work has revolved around themes inspired by reading T.S Eliot, a modernist christian poet and critic. His most famous poem, ’The wasteland’ (1922), is a compression of history and a reflection of our human condition. One of the themes it explores is how, more and more, the modern world is in a state of religious frustration as a result of people's unwillingness to ’face their demons’, as it were, and opting rather to fritter their lives away in spectacle and purposelessness where God plays a non-primary role. Yet, according to the poem, the world and the people in it remain God’s creation, whether it is believed to be so or not. It claims that we are spiritual creatures who crave a relationship with our creator and if this is denied it results in frustration.

I myself am a christian from boyhood. I officially gave my heart to God at the age of thirteen, but by the time I reached my early twenties, a distance had developed between me and God. I increasingly pursued my own ways, disregarding what God might think of them, and rationalizing the things I felt ’guilty’ about as being OK by some or other argument. Thus, an emptiness grew, and even though I had much materially, I was very unhappy. I discovered that life as the ’pleasure game’ was sterile and I was struck generally by the apparent irrelavence and unrelatedness of things. I felt that I was wandering aimlessly, in feverish, useless motion and that my human life had been crushed into something mean and sordid by bourgeois ’civilisation’.

Thus Eliot’s poem resonates with me, as it describes that phase of my life with startling accuracy and insight, of how God reached out to me in those times, and the moments of divine connection I experienced that eventually brought me (towards my late twenties) to rededicate myself to following God’s ways, and as a result gaining a sense of purpose and well-being that is strong enough to sustain me in life.