Christmas, For the Time Being

God's Will will be done.

Two years ago, I made my long overdue first acquaintance with W. H. Auden. I had long been a card-carrying T. S. Eliot fangirl and anticipated this would be a similar experience. I was not disappointed, though I never did find anything in Auden’s catalogue that touched and shaped me so profoundly as Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” For me, the piece that came the closest was the epic Christmas prose-poetry oratorio “For the Time Being.”

I should confess upfront that I don’t claim to understand this whole work front to back. And, perhaps heretically, I still reserve judgement on whether certain sections of it actually mean anything in particular. But when the poem’s meaning is clear, it breaks forth with a beauteous, heavenly light. Ancient and modern are strangely commingled as the voices of Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the wise men, Simeon, even Herod and his soldiers take turns with a Chorus, all offering their two cents on what exactly the whole thing means.

I love many passages, but if I had to pick a favorite, perhaps it would be the Annunciation, as Gabriel and Mary together approach the point of Logos incarnated, myth actualized, “no longer a pretend but true.” Gabriel concludes:

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.

The poem then moves into a call-and-response section between a soloist and a chorus, as the weary world slowly stirs awake and begins to rejoice. “Let even the great rejoice,” it commands, the “rich and the lovely” whose arrogance for a brief moment has been arrested, “till their own reflection came between” again. “Let even the small rejoice,” the dazed downcast and crushed under soldier’s booted heel, lifting their heads to catch the distant triumph song that even now steals on the ear. “Let even the young rejoice,” the lovers betrayed, the ones who have wept and clawed their pillow in the night. “Let even the old rejoice,” it commands, “the Bleak and the Dim” forgotten in the old folks’ home as the Hallmark channel flickers through its dismal catalogue on the TV opposite. For the conqueror is come, the dragon’s Demolisher, “singing and dancing.”

Soon, Simeon lends his aid in prose, touching what his eyes cannot see, rejoicing that “the incomprehensible I AM” has now come to us as that which we “may actively love with comprehension that THOU ART.” So we have beheld his glory, “with the eyes of our own weakness.” So we are made bold, “bold to say that we have seen our salvation.”

But not all are rejoicing. Another voice enters to make his plaintive plea in prose. Have a thought for Herod, it whines. Spare a thought for old King Herod. He has tried everything to uphold Reason against Superstition’s black tide. He has taxed the card-players, he has banned the crystal-hustlers, he has made the medium a statutory offender, all to no avail. Even his own captain of the guard “wears an amulet against the Evil Eye.” “Reason is helpless,” he laments, “Legislation is helpless against the wild prayer of longing.” “Be interesting and weak like us,” they pray, “and we will love you as we love ourselves.”

This cannot be. This must not be. He dares not think what it would mean, if the trio who came to see him this morning figured it right. What would it mean for Revelation to replace Reason, Pity to replace Justice? It is too much, too much. It cannot be. The “corner-boy” must not be allowed to think himself such “a devil of a fellow” that God in flesh would come down to save him in person. The “crook” will, of course, seize his chance to go on sinning that mercy may abound. The “young cop” will take death-bed confessions. The “hermits, bums and invalids” will be “The New Aristocracy,” the new “heroes and heroines of the New Tragedy.” This cannot be. Naturally, this must not be. Oh come, don’t look at him so. He doesn’t want to be horrid. He’s “a liberal.” He wants “everyone to be happy.”

Herod is thwarted, of course, and we follow the Family safely into Egypt. Then we return to anti-climax:

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.

And so all make their way back to the time being, the grown-up children who once “whispered so excitedly/Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be,” and “grew up when it opened.” We feel guilty as we recall this moment, because we have grown old now, old and distracted, our hearts no longer undivided in their attention. In a fit of piety, longing for anything to restore this concentration, we may be tempted to ask we know not what:

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.

This passage hits me differently now than it did when I first read it two years ago, in the calm before the storm that would forever change my family’s lives. That grim line, “They will come, all right, don’t worry” is no longer something I merely nod along to as a profound poetic abstraction. It has been concretized in more dreadful ways than we imagined, through the chain of events that culminated in my mother’s vaccine injury, for which hope of a cure is receding by the day.

I’m moved to reflect that chronic illness, by its nature, becomes its own kind of “noontime” in Auden’s scheme, as he pictures the drawn-out gray sameness between “happy morning” and “night of agony” — a “noon of agony,” if you will. This was captured very compellingly to me by Ross Douthat in his new memoir The Deep Places, which chronicles an illness different in kind, yet similar in character. I also think of friends who have suffered in other ways this year, particularly those fighting the long war against mental illness. I only learned months after the fact that one friend had been put on suicide watch, after planning to kill himself the same way another friend of mine killed himself last year.

Into this noontime, the voice of Auden’s Chorus speaks, pointing the Way, recalling the Truth and the Life. We follow it limping, some of us. Still, with willing feet, we follow.

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.