12 November 2022

Praying in Ordinary Time with USPG
and the poetry of TS Eliot:
Saturday 12 November 2022

‘The child wonders at the Christmas Tree’ TS Eliot … a Christmas card with the Church of Saint Mary and Saint George Church, Comberford, in a watercolour by Freda Morgan (2008)

Patrick Comerford

This is Remembrance weekend: yesterday was Remembrance Day, and tomorrow is Remembrance Sunday. Before this day gets busy, I am taking some time this morning for reading, prayer and reflection.

Throughout this week, I have been reflecting in these ways:

1, One of the readings for the morning;

2, A reflection based on the poetry of TS Eliot … ‘The Waste Land’ was first published 100 years ago, in 1922;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary, ‘Pray with the World Church.’

‘... the child/For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel/Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree/Is not only a decoration, but an angel’ (TS Eliot) … an angel atop a Christmas Tree in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Luke 18: 1-8 (NRSVA):

1 Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. 2 He said, ‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, “Grant me justice against my opponent.” 4 For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming”.’ 6 And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? 8 I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’

‘The child wonders at the Christmas Tree’ TS Eliot … a Christmas Tree with Christmas presents on the floor, in Castle Durrow, Co Laois (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,’ by TS Eliot: a reflection

Throughout this week, from Monday to Friday, I have been reflecting each morning on TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ first published 100 years ago in 1922.

It is still six weeks to Christmas. But already many of the Christmas decorations are up in Stony Stratford, and the anticipation has begun in the build-up towards switching on the Christmas lights in the town two weeks from now (26 November 2022).

Many shop fronts have Christmas themes in the windows, cards and Christmas baubles are on sale, and some people are already planning their Christmas trees.

So, following this week’s reflections on ‘The Waste Land,’ my choice of a poem this morning is ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,’ by TS Eliot.

Eliot’s poem ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’ was first published on 26 October 1954 as part of a newer series of his ‘Ariel Poems’ by Faber & Faber, and was illustrated by David Jones. This poem is numbered A66 in Gallup’s bibliography of Eliot’s works.

Christmas has a significance throughout Eliot’s work, not only in the Ariel poems, but in his play Murder in the Cathedral, where Thomas à Becket preaches his Christmas sermon.

The four earlier Ariel poems – ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927), ‘A Song for Simeon’ (1928), ‘Animula’ (1929) and ‘Marina’ (1930) – are Eliot’s first poems of declared Christian belief and were published in successive years as illustrated Christmas greetings by his London publishers and employers Faber & Gwyer (later Faber and Faber). They are severe and rigorous examinations of the significance of Christmas. The original four could hardly be described as ‘festive.’

But ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’ relents a little in this respect. When I first read this poem, I thought it was a more lightweight and less serious poem than the other Ariel poems or other well-known poems by Eliot, such as ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), ‘Ash Wednesday’ (1930), and the poems in ‘The Four Quartets’ (1935-1942) Yet, in many ways, this poem is marked by its wry understatement.

This poem is much later and is less well-known than ‘Journey of the Magi’ or ‘A Song for Simeon’ (1928). In those poems, Eliot presents the Nativity not as a joyous event but in the context of the ‘bitter agony’ of death that is inextricably linked with this birth.

The speaker in ‘Journey of the Magi’ is one of the Magi, now elderly, for whom Christ’s birth represents his own death but who is uncertain of the significance of what he has witnessed.

In ‘A Song for Simeon’, the narrator is also an old man, Simeon, who sees, understands and embraces the significance of the new-born child presented in the Temple.

In many ways, ‘Animula’ is the bleakest of the Ariel poems, tracing human life from birth to death, while recalling in the child ‘taking pleasure/ In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.’

The fourth Ariel poem, ‘Marina,’ seems to be the most hopeful, in which Eliot recalls the ‘scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog,’ so that the boat carries hints of Christmas trees, as this life is only a foretaste, ‘Living to live in a world of time beyond me.’

Eliot returns to the Christmas theme in ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,’ and in this poem he turns to the meaning of Advent and Christmas that can so easily get lost in the panic about chores, turkeys and cards:

Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.


Here, we find echoes of Eliot’s opening words in ‘East Coker’, the second of ‘The Four Quartets’: ‘In my beginning is my end,’ and of his closing words: ‘In my end is my beginning.’

While ‘A Song for Simeon’ and ‘Journey of the Magi’ address specifically Biblical and theological themes, ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’ deals directly with the holiday season, and is filled with contemporary observations of popular devotions and rituals that we all love at this time of the year.

By the time he wrote this poem, Eliot was 66 years old, but he imagines himself as a more elderly man looking back at the Christmases of his childhood, recapturing his own childhood memories as he anticipates Christmas morning.

Eliot seems to strike the appropriate tone when he discusses the proper celebration and meaning of Christmas. He advocates the innocence and simplicity of a sentimental celebration of Christmas, filled with a beautiful tree, a bountiful feast, and new toys. The spirit of the season is not idolatry, but is a truly Christian ‘happiness and cheer.’ This is a season of cheer and goodwill, a season filled with the warmth and joy that Christ’s coming into the world should inspire in a loveless world that is in need of saving.

Here we read Eliot’s last poetic comments on the mystery of the incarnation and on the mystery of life itself. The same mystery that in majesty creates the child’s wonder also brings the soul and the world to judgment.

The first sentence of the poem introduces several possible attitudes towards Christmas, of whom the childish is the one Eliot wants us to give priority. The second sentence, which constitutes the rest of the poem – thanks to three colons, a semicolon, and several sets of parentheses – tells the reader how Christmas should be viewed and experienced.

Eliot now pictures vividly the various trappings of Christmas and the wonder they should inspire from childhood onward, while warning against ‘bored habituation,’ fatigue, tedium, awareness of death, consciousness of failure and

... the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit.


Then, in parentheses, he recalls his own memories of Saint Lucy’s Day, which he may have been part of his American childhood experiences, but is difficult for readers in this part of Europe to grasp. He clearly wants to link the celebration of this day and its inclusion of children with the celebration of Christmas, and paints a visual image by evoking the flame of light in darkness and of brave martyrdom when he speaks of ‘her carol, and her crown of fire.’

Saint Lucy was a young woman in the third century who maintained unflinching faith in the face of martyrdom. Her name comes from the Latin for ‘light,’ and some traditions say she was miraculously protected from being burned alive. On her feast day on 13 December, Scandinavian girls dress as Saint Lucy, wearing crowns of candles and singing carols about her.

Eliot closes the poem with a reminder of the true significance of Christmas and the future. Christ’s birth leads to his death and resurrection, and to the founding of the Church, when ‘fear came upon every soul.’ His first coming at his incarnation also foreshadows his second coming in judgment:

Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.


‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’ was published in 1954 and illustrated by David Jones

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees by TS Eliot.

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish – which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.

The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,

So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):

So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.

‘I remember also with gratitude / St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire’(TS Eliot) … an image of Saint Lucy on the Campo di San Geremia door of the Chiesa di S. Geremia e Lucia in Venice (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

The Collect:

Almighty Father,
whose will is to restore all things
in your beloved Son, the King of all:
govern the hearts and minds of those in authority,
and bring the families of the nations,
divided and torn apart by the ravages of sin,
to be subject to his just and gentle rule;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Post Communion Prayer:

God of peace,
whose Son Jesus Christ proclaimed the kingdom
and restored the broken to wholeness of life:
look with compassion on the anguish of the world,
and by your healing power
make whole both people and nations;
through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Additional Collect

God, our refuge and strength,
bring near the day when wars shall cease
and poverty and pain shall end,
that earth may know the peace of heaven
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Collect on the Eve of the Second Sunday before Advent:

Heavenly Father, whose blessed Son was revealed
to destroy the works of the devil
and to make us the children of God and heirs of eternal life:
grant that we, having this hope,
may purify ourselves even as he is pure;
that when he shall appear in power and great glory
we may be made like him in his eternal and glorious kingdom;
where he is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The theme in the USPG Prayer Diary this week has been ‘A New Commandment.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday by Sue Claydon, chair of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship.

The USPG Prayer Diary invites us to pray today in these words:

Let us pray that our hearts may be open towards our neighbour. And for those who persecute us, or intend, or would like to harm us – then we are directly following Christ’s commandment. Help us to work together for the common good.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

TS Eliot’s former offices with Faber and Faber at 24 Russell Square … ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’ was published in 1954 as part of a newer series of his ‘Ariel Poems’ by Faber & Faber (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

‘The child wonders at the Christmas Tree’ TS Eliot … the Christmas Tree in the Rectory in Askeaton, Co Limerick, last Christmas (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Choosing our ancestors and
searching for Sephardic
cousins over cups of coffee

Lunch with my ‘cousin’ Kevin Martin in the house where WB Yeats lived over 100 years ago (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Patrick Comerford

I had lunch in London last week with my ‘cousin’ Kevin Martin in Casa Jardim on Woburn Walk, behind Saint Pancras Church on Euston Road, neatly placed between Bloomsbury and King’s Cross.

This café was once known as ‘Wot the Dickens’, and it seems I have known this part of London for most of my life, and this small street with its many literary links.

Woburn Walk was designed 200 years ago by Thomas Cubitt in 1822 as London’s first pedestrianised shopping street. Charles Dickens lived nearby, and it is easy to imagine that he strolled along this street while he lived in Bloomsbury.

A plaque on the façade of No 5 marks the house where WB Yeats lived for more than a quarter of a century from 1895 to 1919, when the house was known as 18 Woburn Buildings.

Despite his many self-made myths, Yeats was living in this house during the Easter Rising. The rise of violent nationalism caused him to reassess his own nationalism, and in Easter, 1916 he wrote:

All changed, changed utterly
A terrible beauty is born


While he was living at Woburn Walk, Yeats married 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees, worked there on some of his finest poetry, and was friends with TS Eliot, Ezra Pound and Rabindranath Tagore.

In the aftermath of World War I, the world was so changed and transformed that Yeats could open his poem The Second Coming with these lines about Europe

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


At first, TS Eliot expressed distaste for Yeats, and mocked his membership of the Theosophical Society. Later, following his attendance at the first performance of Yeats’s one-act play, At the Hawk’s Well, and after the publication of ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ in 1919, Eliot softened his opinion of Yeats’s poetry.

Later too, Maud Gonne lived in the same house that is now part of Casa Jardim, a restaurant, café and food shop.

There last week, over what seemed like endless cups of coffee, Kevin and I discussed family history and Sephardic genealogy, including the Comerford, Mendoza, Martinez and Nunez families.

It was a conversation that took us from London to Cork, Youghal, Lisbon, Porto, Amsterdam, Venice, Jerusalem, Fez, Tangier, Surinam, Curaçao, Peru, Mexico and many places in between and beyond.

We discussed the role of antisemitism in politics in Poland, Russia and Ukraine, and the stories of conversos or ‘secret Jews’ in Belmonte and mountain villages in Portugal, hiding from the Inquisition in Peru and the Mexico, and claims to Sephardic ancestry in New Mexico.

The prospect of Portuguese passports for people who can prove descent from families that fled the Inquisition means we have both been approached by people offering genealogical commissions anxious to prove Sephardic ancestry.

But we also discussed the complexities and intricacies of Sephardic ancestry and identity. For many people who can only divide the Jewish identities into Ashkenazim and Sephardim, there is a vast cultural array to explore. The rich and diverse ‘non-Ashkenazic’ world is multi-layered and includes Romaniotes, Mizrahim, Italkim, Maghrebi, Yemenite and ‘Oriental’ Jews.

There is irony in some of the efforts to conflate these identities. Kevin reminded me how the word Maghreb means ‘western’ and so it is tautological to speak of Oriental Maghrebis.

I recalled a conversation with one Greek Jew, who proudly dismissed the notion that Romaniote Jews had lived in Greece since Byzantine times. ‘There have been Jews in Greece since Alexander the Great was a boy.’ But he quickly, and proudly, corrected himself. ‘There have been Jews in Greece since Moses was a boy.’

Is the phenomenon of increasing claims to Sephardic ancestry in New Mexico a fashion? Could so many Sephardic Jews have crossed the Atlantic escaping the prying eyes of Inquisitors on the Iberian Peninsula and the New World? And could there have been so many needed to generate so many descendants in New Mexico and the American southwest today?

We could have had a full afternoon seminar on James Clifford’s work on ‘ethnographic allegory.’ Certainly, we construct genealogies to comfort our own sense of identity and kinship, belonging in time and space and among people.

Kevin and I are not ‘cousins’ in the strict work of DNA analysts. But we are part of overlapping layers of families that fit more easily into patterns like Venn diagrams rather than limited linear narratives.

Our conversations last week can be linked to the shared search for the Irish family, if any, of the prize-fighter Daniel Mendoza (1764-1836), who was the boxing champion of England in 1792-1795, and was claimed as an ancestor by the comedian and actor the late Peter Sellers (1925-1980).

In his book Jewish Dublin: Portraits of Life by the Liffey (2007), the late Alan Benson cited Louis Hyman in The Jews of Ireland to claim that Daniel Mendoza was ‘descended … from an impoverished Irish Jewish family of ten children, forced by circumstances to emigrate to England.’

The Mendoza family can be traced back, not to Ireland, but to David de Mendoza (1650-1730), a Marrano or a member of a Jewish family that had converted publicly to Christianity at the Inquisition but continued to practice Judaism privately. David Mendoza and his wife Abigail David de la Penha Castro (1665-1751) moved with their children from Seville to Amsterdam, where they were free to resume the public practice of their Jewish faith and rituals.

Their grandson, Aaron Daniel de Mendoza (1709-1751), and his wife Bienvenida Abraham Tubi (1709-1765), were married in Bevis Marks or the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue in London in 1730. They were the parents of Abigail Nunes Martinez (1744-1810), the grandmother of Sarah (A’Cohen) Asher, who in turn was the grandmother of the sisters Aggie and Rosina Sipple who married the brothers Harry and Bert Comerford.

But Abigail Nunes Martinez was also the sister of Abraham Aaron Mendoza (1732-1805), whose son Daniel Mendoza (1764-1836) was the famous prize-fighter and the boxing champion of England in 1792-1795.

Kevin Martin, who shares a descent from the Mendoza family, points out how Aaron Mendoza ‘literally disappears’ from Sephardic or Spanish and Portuguese records in England and ‘it has been suggested that he ended up in Ireland.’

Perhaps there are more people of Sephardic descent in Ireland than in New Mexico, I thought with amusement.

We shared stories of some of the most interesting Sephardic families of Seville, Livorno, Venice, Amsterdam and the East End of London – a reminder how we are all inter-related and how identity is so often something that we select in a ‘pick-and-mix’ manner from the variety of identities available to many families on these islands.

But then, I suppose, we are all related by no more than six degrees of separation. We can all rejoice in the diversity we share, thanks to a time when borders were open and refugees fleeing religious persecution were welcomed with open arms on these islands.

Shabbat Shalom, Buen shabat

Another view of the world from Casa Jardim and the house where WB Yeats lived over 100 years ago (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)