What makes prayer valid? For the poet, T.S. Eliot, there is something more, something that is sometimes unnoticed, but which, if realized, can reanimate prayer life. This brief essay unfolds in three steps: (1) pointing to the contemplative influence of Eliot's conversion to the Church of England; (2) depicting the seventeenth-century Little Gidding lay-monastic community as the definitive influence on Eliot's final quartet; and (3) unpacking six interrelated prayer-revitalizing insights from a passage in ‘Little Gidding’, practices that help make prayer valid.
