FOR THE TIME BEING
Auden's Poem for Advent
Auden's Poem for Advent
By Jim Burklo
“Since Adam, being free to choose,
Chose to imagine he was free
To choose his own necessity,
Lost in his freedom, Man pursues
The shadow of his images:
Today the Unknown seeks the known;
What I am willed to ask, your own
Will has to answer child it lies
Within your power of choosing to
Conceive the child who chooses you.”
These are the words addressed to the Virgin Mary, put into the mouth of the Angel Gabriel by the British poet, WH Auden, in his Christmas oratorio – “For the Time Being”.My first introduction to this poem of many poems was in seminary, in San Anselmo, Marin County, California, in 1976. My girlfriend at the time was a high school drama teacher. We heard that this oratorio was going to be performed at my seminary, so we went together. It was a dramatic reading, and a long one, and it entranced us both. We kept looking at each other in wonderment. Enough of it stuck for us to realize that it was very profound and important. But most of it went right past our ears and over our heads. We both realized that we’d need the printed version to even begin to appreciate it.
All these years later, having re-read it many times, much of it still goes into my eyes but finds but a few landing pads in my brain. Yet it haunts my soul. I’d like to share enough of it for you to enter into its enchantment. Because it is the enchantment of Christmas.
Auden wrote “For the Time Being” in 1944, while WWII was raging in Europe. Britain had been smashed by the German Blitz. Its soldiers were being bloodied at the Battle of the Bulge. Both the first and second World Wars had pulverized more than cities. They had bombed out faith in the inevitability of human progress. The unspeakable savagery of supposedly highly civilized peoples was humbling, to say the least. The rational mind of the Europeans had made possible the incredible technological advances of the 19th and early 20th centuries. And yet that rational mind was of no use in preventing the horrors in which those advances were employed.
We can only begin to imagine what Christmas was like in Britain or anywhere else in Europe in 1944. Bittersweet at best. Responding to these ambient sentiments, Auden responded with this long poetic disquisition on the meanings of the incarnation, following the gospel story from the annunciation to Mary to the birth of Jesus to the holy family’s exile in Egypt.
“For the Time Being” can be read as a eulogy for Europeans’ trust in the perfectibility of humankind. Auden’s reading of the history in which his life was situated led him to become a traditional orthodox Anglican Christian believer. He believed that a faith transcending reason was needed for civilization to survive. But he wasn’t a fundamentalist, reading the Bible stories as facts that could be demonstrated as true. Here are the prayerful words he put into Joseph’s mouth, as Joseph grappled with Mary’s scandalous pregnancy:
“All I ask is one
Important and elegant proof
That what my Love had done
Was really at your will
And that your will is Love.”
And the answer he got from the Angel Gabriel was this:
“No, you must believe;
Be silent, and sit still.”
Believe without proof. Believe without evidence. Have raw faith that bypasses what appears to be absurd, in order to enter the kingdom of heaven on earth. His experience of the faith was similar to that of Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish existential philosopher/theologian who wrote about the “leap of faith”, recognizing that the doctrines of Christianity don’t make logical sense, but call us to embrace them regardless. The theological term for this perspective is neo-orthodoxy, which dominated mainline Protestant Christianity in the postwar period.
There’s the leap of faith that accepts implausible doctrines without vainly attempting to rationalize them. Then there is the kind of faith that leaps over doctrines altogether, and focuses on evoking the depth-spirituality that produced the doctrines in the first place. To Joseph’s plea for proof of God’s intentions, I would have Gabriel answer without reference to belief at all. I’d simply answer: “Be silent, and sit still.” Auden alludes to this kind of faith later in his passage about Joseph: “To choose what is difficult all one’s days as if it were easy, that is faith.” That’s raw faith – faith as a way of living – faith as an orientation, as opposed to an assent to a belief system.
T
he child Jesus was presented to Simeon in the temple for his blessing, and Auden’s rendition of it is a long philosophical and theological explication of the significance of the incarnation. Auden saw the birth of the Christ as a turning point in history. Things had come to a head. To think that we humans could work a clever way out of our existential predicament was no longer viable. God taking human form, living among us and drawing us near, was the only resolution. Absurd, but necessary. “The Word could not be made flesh until men had reached a state of absolute contradiction between clarity and despair in which they would have no choice but either to accept absolutely or to reject absolutely yet in their choice there should be no element of luck, for they would be fully conscious of what they were accepting or rejecting…. And because of his visitation, we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking: our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present. Therefore at every moment we pray that, following Him, we may depart from our anxiety into His peace.”Auden includes another long speech, this one by King Herod. It is a brilliant interpretation of the current events of his time. And it rings true today – comically, but depressingly true. Herod is lamenting his perceived duty to massacre the innocents in order to dispose of the baby Jesus as a future threat to his dynasty. “O dear, why couldn’t this wretched infant be born somewhere else? Why can’t people be sensible? I don’t want to be horrid. Why can’t they see that the notion of a finite God is absurd? Because it is… Why should (God) dislike me so? I’ve worked like a slave. Ask anyone you like. I read all official dispatches without skipping. I’ve taken elocution lessons. I’ve hardly ever taken bribes. How dare He allow me to decide? I’ve tried to be good. I brush my teeth every night. I haven’t had sex for a month. I object. I’m a liberal. I want everyone to be happy. I wish I had never been born.” Herod’s speech rhymes with our times, as ICE tears families apart and deports people who have been here for ten, twenty, and thirty years – all in the name of law and order and proper governance.
I read “For the Time Being” in two ways at once. I read it as Auden’s profoundly beautiful and evocative poetic affirmation of the neo-orthodox Christian doctrine of the incarnation. And at the same time, I read it as poetry about poetry. For Auden, Christmas was a reality defying the rational. For me, the sublime myth of Jesus’ birth is poetry evoking the emergence of unconditional Love in the world.
"For the Time Being" comes to a close with a chorus. It is an invitation to walk the path of Advent. A poetic road-map into the kingdom of heaven on earth. It welcomes us into the sacred myth of Christmas:
“He is the Way.
Follow him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth.
Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.”