The Final Section of WH Auden’s “For the Time Being” (FTTB)
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So finally, today, I offer a our final mediation on this great Christmas Play.
Those who celebrate the Commercialist Christmas —who believe Christmas ends on December 26th— you no doubt see it as ridiculous that I’m still writing on this stuff, all these days later.
Frankly, even those of you who honor the actual Christmas season —the “Twelve Days” that ended last Saturday— you too might just be thinking, “Jeez, Eric, give it a rest…”
But there is a method to my madness, dear friends.
My strong belief is that WH Auden’s final words of “For the Time Being” were written for a day like today.
Some midwinter day, when nothing particularly urgent seems to be happening.
While this section is titled, “Flight Into Egypt,” it’s not really the Holy Family that takes center stage. Yes, the first stanzas are indeed all about them. And in Auden’s telling of the tale, their narrative ends with their flight to desert-lands….to barren lands.
And then, the “Narrator” — the one who in my own mind, looks and sounds exactly like the “Stage Manager” in Thorton Wilder’s “Our Town”— steps back on stage, and returns for one final speech.
The lights dim. Perhaps a spotlight comes up. And we all focus our attention on their final words of wisdom. This voice will offer the very same kind of feeling of wisdom Wilder’s character also delivers.
It’s their job to sum everything up, and to close everything down.
And where The Narrator leaves us is, kind of, back where we started.
As I’ve said for decades now, Advent is time when time seems to fold back on itself, but also look off into the future.
There are really three senses of “time” that fold together during Advent…
- We look back…at the “once upon a time” coming of the Christ Child…
- We look to the present…in the hopes that Christmas will somehow banish our seasonal depression, and bring us “Hope, Peace, Love, and Joy” today.
- We look to some future time of “Hope, Peace, Love, and Joy” that might never end” and come “once and for all.”
This is the meaning of the liturgical affirmation:
“Christ has died…Christ has risen…Christ will come again…”
And for us today, and every year, as soon as Christmas comes…
It’s gone…
And it’s still middle of the freaking winter…
And it’s still freaking cold, with the harshest weather still to come…
(Just this week, of course, we’re all warily watching the first real “winter storm” of this year)
And so, we hope for some sense of Christ to remain in our lives NOW, and mourn the holiday that has passed.
This is “Eschatological” —in the true and best sense of that word.
(Escatology is the hope for Christ to “come again.”)
And yes, modern Evangelicalism has fairly well ruined this concept by insisting it means some bloody, violent, and rapidly approaching, end to the Earth.
“Jesus is coming,” they seem to obsessively say, “so why bother saving the planet, or stopping wars?”
But I think there is a DEEPER Eschatological view…and it’s something like this:
That it’s damn hard to maintain faith, not because the world is about to END…but because it’s not. At least, not today. Jesus very clearly says “nobody can know the day.” We were never meant to obsess on some bloody, final “end,” whether or not it ever comes. That’s a distraction.
The real works is the work of TODAY.
(This is also the theme of Howard Thurman’s great post-Christmas poem…)
The hardest days of our lives are not “Feast Days” like Christmas or Easter…like a wedding or a birth of a child…but all the very many days in between. Average days… when the monotony of our ordinary lives creeps in, and takes over.
I have theory that perhaps we are attracted to both stories of Evangelical “Escatology,” and all the Hollywood Blockbuster “action” movies, for the exact same metaphorical reasons.
Think about it.
How many of YOU…of us…are fascinated by these same celluloid tales of potential annihilation?
Thousands of us pile into theaters, or settle in at home with our popcorn, to watch humanity on the brink of some kind of Escataololigcal annihilation (Godzilla, Aliens, Disease, Terrorists…take your pick…).
How many of us LOVE these films…where some “hero,” some stroke of luck, or magical collective good will of humanity…saves us all, just in the nick of time?
It’s the SAME THING!
It’s Evangelical Escatology all over again…packaged by Hollywood, back to us, as our worst fears and fantasies of social and cultural annihilation.
And the reason we enjoy both…the theological and the celluloid…so very much is because in “ordinary life,” things get so damn “boring.”
Auden’s Narrator says as much in one part of this last, seminal section:
“Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father:
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine.”
We go looking for suffering…for adrenaline-laced entertainment…when in fact, the suffering of our world is already all around us. There’s actually always PLENTY to do.
Remember, Auden is writing this during WWII. There was a BIT of anxiety loose in the culture then, yes?
(Much like our time…)
But, for all of us, the boredom of life can creep back in.
I still recall talking about this dynamic with a church member years ago….how life is chock-full of wonder, and yet how we get bored, anyway. She was a survivor of a very serious form of brain cancer, should not have lived, and came to understand the precious nature of every day.
But she once said to me, “Eric, of all people, you would think I would appreciate every single day of life….and never be bored…but even I do…even I forget…”
Of course she does.
Because it’s part of our human condition.
We look to amuse ourselves out of this boredom, drudgery, and “same-ness.”
We hope to be shaken loose of it.
But the dust grows, the time passes…and day, after day, after day…just run together.
The post holiday-blues are all about the dawning realization that the “real world,” with all its mundane drudgery, is still there.
It’s why it’s hard to come back from vacation.
It’s why we keep talking about “The Big Game,” days after its over.
It’s why we share pictures of baby’s births, even when they become adults in their mid twenties.
We yearn for the SPECIAL times…the Feast Days.
And our adrenaline-fueled desires to escape ordinary life, however we attempted it —religion, entertainment, food, drugs, alcohol, shopping, sex— none of these can actually help us transcend this world for good…perhaps because transcending the world was never actually the point.
What we all need —what the world needs, I very strongly believe— is to embrace the Christmas message every day. To understand that even our most boring, monotonous days can, and are, filled with Holy Moments. That the “Thin Places” between heaven and earth don’t just exist in a select few spots…but all around our relatively “ordinary” neighborhood.
This is the challenge of living life through what I call “Incarnational Seeing.”
I believe it must be very close to what Buddhists say when they counsel “Be here now.”
Be here…see the holy…embrace Incarnation… in the NOW.
Don’t pine for the past (like Auden’s “Arcadians”).
And don’t get lost in some dream of the future (like Auden’s “Utopians.”)
Be here now…see the Christ Child now, all around you….NOW.
If I may, this is why the longest season of the Church Year is called “Ordinary Time,” because the longest, hardest struggle of our lives is the internal one…working to see with spiritual clarity, such that the world doesn’t just dissolve into pointless materialism.
“Ordinary Time” perfectly describes most of our lives.
And it’s how, if you’ll recall, Auden started this poem too.
The very first lines of FTTB locate us in “Advent,” and name the drudgery of “Ordinary Time”:
“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.
Huge crowds mumble-“Alas,
Our angers do not increase,
Love is not what she used to be”;
Portly Caesar yawns-“I know”;
He falls asleep on his throne,
They shuffle off through the snow:
Darkness and snow descend.”
These are the first first lines of the poem.
And, sure enough, some of the very LAST lines the Narrator speaks will sound much like them:
“In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance.”
This is the very meaning of what the Church intends by “Ordinary Time.”
Auden locates our current time, our post-Christmas time:
“The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practise his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith”
Auden seemingly comes back to this exact same point here at the end.
But this is actually another illusion.
Because there one key difference not miss.
One truly important thing that has changed.
And that key difference is held within the lines of verse that perhaps speak more to me than any others.
THESE next lines are the lines that inspired my song “Sun is Gonna Show.”
THESE are the lines that gave me the title of my first record, back in 2000.
THESE next lines, at a key moment in my life as a young man, shot me between the eyes.
THESE are the lines I come back to, year after year, and speak some very deep, spiritual truth to me:
“To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.”
We HAVE seen the Child.
WE HAVE felt that sense of the complete and total unity of “heaven and earth.”
The curtian has pulled back to reveal Jesus’ story and the magnificent truth of Flesh and Spirit, unified as one.
But that incredible experience…fades…as “Ordinary Time” again creeps in.
Once we have seen the Child…once we have embraced a lifetime’s spiritual journey of “Incarnational Seeing,” the “most trying time of all” are not days filled with…
…horror or joy…
…sorrow or intense love…
…Feast Days or Famine Days…
“The most trying time(s) of all” is/are/and always will-be… all the in-between days.
The hardest journey is the journey inward that constantly re-remembers that this world, right here, right now, is chock full of God’s holiness, and reanimates what we SEE as filled with spiritual delight, not just boredom and repetition.
Every walk in your neighborhood, every glance by your friends, every savory scent of every meal you ever ate (even your Big Mac), has the possibility of breaking open some holy experience.
But this is not how it feels.
We feel divided against ourselves…and we go yearning to fill that spiritual hole, instead of seeing the holiness already there.
The silence of Ordinary Time is neither “for nor against” our faith.
It’s not a bright morning.
It’s not a deep night.
It’s NOON.
—————————
And so, dear readers, our journey ends here.
Back with Auden’s Narrator.
What follows is a citation of the entire final speech by the Narrator…and then Auden’s “Chorus” closing the work with an interpretation of “The Way, The Truth, and The Life.”
(A kind of final “Amen,” “Benediction,” or “Doxology.”)
As I hope this essay has suggested to you, The Narrator speech is a bit of verse for us today, and for every-everyday.
These are the lines that zapped me between the eyes, decades ago, and pushed me to read this work over and over, every year since.
And I hope they’ll inspire YOU on your lifetime journey toward “Incarnational Seeing.”
Thank you for reading these essays…..EF
“Narrator:
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes-
Some have got broken-and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school.
There are enough Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week-
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot
Stayed up so late, attempted-quite unsuccessfully-
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father:
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practise his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will be done, that, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
CHORUS
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.”