Advent

Posted by DJL on Dec 6, 2014 in Poetry | 0 comments

I am a big fan of W. H. Auden’s poem For the Time Being. It’s more than a poem, of course, it’s a dramatic narrative, a poetic play, formally called an Oratorio. In fact, it’s called a Christmas Oratorio. And while I’ve always thought it reads a little better after Christmas – maybe mid-way through January when the Christmas bills come due and the feast and lights seem a dim memory – there is actually a section appointed for Advent that suits the season well. It describes the march of the shepherds toward Bethlehem, toward the hope that has been announced to them but that as yet they can scarce believe.

It is not, as you’ll see, a cheery section. But rather, as suits particularly the old sense of Advent, rather apprehensive and penitential. It describes a regret-saturated recognition of the outcome of our yearning for freedom over relationship, for independence over intra-dependence, and for knowledge over wisdom.

But amid the dour, though perhaps also realistic, assessment of our limitations, there also rests the quiet intimation of the heart of Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation. “We who are about to die,” the shepherds intone, “demand a miracle.” Why? Because mired as we are in our own finitude, mortality, and limitation, “Nothing can save that is possible.” Something beyond our reality must reach in to touch and change the reality we have created.

Such a gesture of divine grace intruding into the deadly humdrum of the ordinary can only cause wonder – “How could the Eternal do a temporal act, / The Infinite become a finite fact?” – and then, though not yet in these lines, joy.

Here, perhaps, it the key to Advent. It is not meant as the absence of Christmas, the time to scold each other for looking ahead too far or too quickly. Rather, Advent invites us instead to pause for a moment that we might reflect long enough to assess our deep need and longing for something more, for something beyond ourselves, for something of the divine to penetrate the ordinary even if for just a moment to remind us that there is indeed, something beyond the possible that will save us.

Advent

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.

Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.

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.

W. H. Auden, from For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.