SL 43 (2013) 133-54 Liturgy at Little Gidding by Regina L. Walton* T. S. Eliot made his pilgrimage to St. John's Church in the tiny English village of Little Gidding, about thirty miles outside of Cambridge, on May 25, 1936. 1 Little Gidding was the former site of what today might be called a religious intentional community of the early seventeenth century, established by Nicholas Ferrar (1592/3-1637) and his family, who were friends of the poet and priest George Herbert (1593-1633). Five years after his visit, in 1941, Eliot composed his poem "Little Gidding," the fourth of his Four Quartets. He perhaps recalled the Ferrar family's night watches and their continual praying of the Psalms as he himself kept vigil as an air raid warden and firewatcher at St. Paul's Cathedral during the Blitz of London. Looking back on his earlier visit, Eliot wrote, "You are here to kneel/Where prayer has been valid."2 It is worth noting that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the question of what constituted "valid" prayer (in words previously composed or extemporaneous), the physical posture in which one prayed, and the holiness of sacred spaces, were all topics of heated debate. The Ferrar family, through their commitment to regular and corporate prayer, sought to "redeem the time," to use a phrase from Eliot's poem "Ash Wednesday." The manner in which they did this made them the subjects of liturgical controversy in the years leading up to the English Civil War. It is the times in which the Ferrars of Little Gidding lived and worshiped that make a study of their liturgical theology worthwhile; they also complicate it.' In * The Rev. Dr. Regina L. Walton (regina.l.walton@gmail.com) received the Ph.D. in religion and literature from Boston University in May 2013. Her dissertation explored theological aesthetics in the writings of George Herbert and the Ferrars of Little Gidding. She is Assistant Rector at St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Weston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 1 On Eliot and Little Gidding, see Ronald Schuchard, "'If I think, again, of this place': Eliot, Herbert and the Way to Little Gidding," in Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot's Four Quartets, ed. Edward Lobb (London: Athlone, 1993), 52-83. 2 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909 1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968),201. 3 For an ecclesiological assessment of the Ferrars' worship, see Trevor Cooper, " 'As wise as ser- pents': The Form and Setting of Public Worship at Little Gidding in the 1630s," in Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain, ed. Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 133