IN HIS great poem of Christian exploration, Four Quartets, T. S.Eliot reflects on our ends and beginnings, our personal history and exploration set within the wider context of human history, of family, genealogy, and memory, and places and spots of time which are revelatory. Wrestling with the elusive quality of words in the poet’s attempt to capture meaning and purpose, he draws on some of the great spiritual writers of the Christian tradition.

In their prayer and their engagement with God they knew the tension common to all religious traditions between the way of affirmation, which strives to crystallise in word, image and symbol the transcendent reality of God, and the way of negation, which knows that definitions recede in the face of God and that all types and shadows have their ending.

In the last of the Quartets, Little Gidding, Eliot describes his pilgrimage to the little redbrick church in Cambridgeshire where, in the 17th century, Nicholas Ferrar and his family kept a regular pattern of Christian prayer and common life, until it was swept away by the religious conflict between King and Parliament.

Ferrar is buried outside the unpretentious, isolated church, which can still move in its simplicity. Eliot found there a place embodying what was for him a moment of revelation. It was a place not of tourism but of prayer.

You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid.

Holy places are significant, for they are places which have a power to point beyond themselves, and challenge us, and raise questions about meaning, and purpose, and what the life we have been given is for and how we are to use it. They are always, of course, ambiguous.

The Temple in Jerusalem was seen by biblical writers in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament to be ambiguous. God, as King Solomon prayed at the dedication of the first Temple, did not dwell in temples made with hands, yet it was in that Temple that Isaiah, encountering the majesty of God, was cleansed from his sin and given his prophetic mission.

God cannot be imprisoned in holy places, any more than the mystery of God can be pinned down in words and concepts. Yet places where prayer has been valid, the places of witness to the faith and of martyrdom, are powerful. They naturally become places of pilgrimage, for they are “thin” places, places where men and women are conscious of the intersection of the timeless with time.

Christianity is a religion of incarnation, in which the Word of God becomes flesh, embedded and embodied in the world. Yet this world which God chooses to know from the inside is a world which in its created reality already points to his presence.

Through that same Word all things were made. Incarnation is the fulfilment of creation. It is from that reality that the sacramental power of place derives, just as the sacraments which incorporate us into God’s new creation, the water of baptism and the bread and wine of the Eucharist are the very stuff of creation.

Faith is distorted whenever an abstract idea replaces the God whose overflowing love holds all things in life and reaches out in self-giving. The disengaged, remote first cause of Deism is a negation of the God revealed in Jesus Christ as creator, redeemer and sanctifier, whose life we are called to share. It is that God who can find us in holy places, be they cathedrals or simple, village churches, desert monasteries or islands such as Iona. They call us out of the stress, muddle and conflict of our lives “to be still — to let go — and know that I am God.”

Eliot found on his pilgrimage a place where the reality of that living God was encountered as “the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling.” Put simply, human lives are about a response in love to the love of God. Therefore the discovery of the path our lives should take, our choices and our actions, is at its heart a vocation, a calling in response to a calling.

In a world in which there are no jobs for life and where the regulation of work is in danger of strangling the offering of love in teaching, in pastoral care, and in service, we need to recover that sense of vocation and defend it powerfully, for it touches the very heart of what we are.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe