Advent with Auden (Part I: "We Who Must Die Demand A Miracle")
First Post on W.H. Auden's "For the Time Being A Christmas Oratorio"
It’s that time of year, again. Advent. Christmas. Shopping. Family. Joy. Dread. Whatever you feel around this time of year, it’s coming. It’s here! If you’re like me, you have a love/hate relationship with all of it. It’s cheesy, it’s materialistic, it’s getting kind of old, and yet there still remains, under the surface, some beating, dreadful heart…you don’t want to, but you sense that there is something quite powerful hiding beneath all of the stuff. We paper over all of it with tinsel, we roll our eyes, but maybe we do so because we are afraid at the terrible joy brimming just below the surface.
And so, in the spirit of wanting to dig a little bit deeper in this season, I want to invite you to join me in reading a lengthy poem by W.H. Auden called For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. It’s a nerdy thing to do, I know, but be a nerd with me.
(A pdf of the full text of the poem can be found here, you can order it on Amazon, or you can just read snippets of it with me if you would like).
For The Time Being is a long and somewhat difficult poem that Auden wrote in the unsettling years of 1941 and 1942 (it was published in 1944). But it’s a rewarding read: I’m not sure I’ve read anything like it, that captures the decadence and dread of modern life while also grasping the sheer, terrible hope of the incarnation. I was first introduced to Auden’s work as a whole from reading the theologian and preacher Fleming Rutledge’s magisterial book on Advent (Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ). I’ve found Auden since then a helpful guide in the scary times that we live in; it’s good to be reminded that we are in “the time being,” a time of waiting and longing for the kingdom to come in its fullness.
So as we get ready to begin the season of Advent, I’d like to use Auden’s Christmas poem as a lens to think more deeply about the bigger picture of things: what exactly has gone wrong, and what does a baby in Bethlehem have to do with any of it? The doubts and fears Auden had in the war-torn 1940s feel ominously contemporary, and I think in light of that we should also look to where Auden found his hope. So, join me?
Advent (Section I)
The first section of Auden’s poem (there are 9 sections) is entitled Advent, and this is where Auden sets the scene for what’s gone wrong. The poem begins in darkness,
Darkness and snow descend;
The clock on the mantelpiece
Has nothing to recommend,
Nor does the face in the glass
Appear nobler than our own
As darkness and snow descend
On all personality
boredom and futility,
“Huge crowds mumble—"Alas,
Our angers do not increase,
Love is not what she used to be”;
Portly Caesar yawns—"I know”
and ultimately fear:
The evil and armed draw near;
The weather smells of their hate
And the houses smell of our fear;
Death has opened his white eye
And the black hole calls the thief
As the evil and armed draw near.
Ravens alight on the wall,
Our plans have all gone awry
The rains will arrive too late,
Our resourceful general
Fell down dead as he drank
And his horses died of grief,
Our navy sailed away and sank;
The evil and armed draw near.
Auden recognizes that humanity has always suffered and struggled; but what he portrays here is that uniquely modern horror, of suffering in a world that doesn’t know or believe in God—without God, even our suffering has no meaning. None of it is getting us anywhere. All our attempts at problem solving, philosophizing, making progress, etc., have all come to not. Our plans as humanity have gone awry, and we’re left in the haunted woods of the modern world, haunted because they are completely, hopelessly silent, without a word from God.
And it is that silence, the silence of God, that provokes the most despair, even more than the fear of suffering. Auden writes, “We are afraid / Of pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare / Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void.”
Fleming Rutledge preaches that “Advent begins in the dark,” and no one understood that better than Auden. If we want to grasp the hope of the Incarnation, we have to be willing to really come to terms with the human condition. Our many problems (war, hunger, disease, pain, hatred, sin, death) have a root problem, which is the vast separation between us and God. How could we know what God is like, if God even exists? And if God exists, why is the world the way it is? And if God exists, why is it so hard for us to hear him and see him? How could the Infinite ever have anything to do with the Finite? It just doesn’t seem possible.
Auden pictures mankind as God-haunted, afraid to believe in God, afraid that God might not be who we think God is, afraid that God might not exist at all:
Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.
I think these lines set the tone for so much of what we are experiencing today. Horrendous evil on our screens; a strange sensation that that evil is possible in all of us; and little understanding or hope for how to remedy our situation. And this really is the provocation of Advent, from the church to the world. Progress? Really? What progress has been made against the sheer fact of evil in the human heart? You are lonely children, the poet cries, lost in the woods, afraid of who or what you might meet in the dark.
Auden paints this bleak vision so we can recognize our impossible predicament. This is how he puts it:
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.
What Auden does in this first section is set the stakes for the season of Advent. Advent calls us to soberly and squarely look at the darkness, evil, suffering, sin, and death in our world, and describe it without sentimentality or falsehood. We recognize, that of our own efforts, there is nothing that we can do to rescue the world. Only a miracle, only an impossibility, could redeem us.
And it’s at that lowest moment, at that darkest hour of the night, that a young girl name Mary receives her calling—an impossible calling—and of course, that’s when the miracle comes and everything changes.
Let’s join in prayer today in our demand for a miracle, for it is only the Impossible that can save us:
O come, O come, Immanuel. And ransom captive Israel!
Next week we are going to look at the next two sections of the poem, The Annunciation and The Temptation of St. Joseph. They contain some of the most profound passages in the poem. If you do try and read the whole thing, let me know what you think! I’d love to hear back from you.