And the Light Shineth in the Darkness…

Spiritual Sunday

 For this Advent season, which begins today, I will be reading W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. A long narrative poem written during the dark days of World War II, For the Time Being recounts the Christmas story in ways that simultaneously allude to the past and the present.

We can also say that it alludes to the future given how well it captures our current state of mind.. In today’s post I examine passages from the opening “Advent” section.

Yesterday I talked to my friend Sue Schmidt about the meaning of Advent, a season that has always eluded me. She pointed me to the world’s suffering and our sense that times are grim. Our Christmas and Hanukkah lights, symbolic of hope in the face of darkness, can seem like a false hope when we gaze into the violence that besets the world. Conversely, our pessimism makes God’s Christmas entry into our lives appear all the more miraculous.

Auden begins his poem with a sense that all has been beaten into a dreary sameness. He may be echoing T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” as he talks about the absence of nobility, leadership and genuine emotions. It’s as though the snow dampens everything.

That the opening stanza begins and ends with the same line—a number of stanzas in the Advent section do this—suggests that we are in a period of dull repetition with no movement forward:

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.

Some of the passages are particularly unsettling given the recent terrorist bombings in Beirut, Paris and Mali and the shootings in Colorado Springs. Imagine that, in the following passage, Auden’s “great Hercules” is the United States, unsure of what to do in the face of rising violence.

In this instance, however, it is not even a question of responding to an attack: Auden will later say that we know how to manage disasters. Far more corrosive is our sense of malaise, captured by the work of the spider, which itself recalls the “wind in dry grass/Or rats’ feet over broken glass/ In our dry cellar” (“The Hollow Men”):

Can great Hercules keep his
Extraordinary promise
To reinvigorate the Empire?
Utterly lost, he cannot
Even locate his task but
Stands in some decaying orchard
Or the irregular shadow
Of a ruined temple, aware of
Being watched from the horrid mountains
By fanatical eyes yet
Seeing no one at all, only hearing
The silence softly broken
By the poisonous rustle
Of famishing Arachne.

Another stanza that seems depressingly relevant occurs a little later. It recalls how, in response to the Paris bombings, American demagogues are stoking public fear about the Syrian refugees:

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.

Towards the end of “Advent,” Auden talks about an unnamable dread that takes hold of our minds, an “It” that is more terrible than any “nightmare of hostile objects.” Perhaps we can see “It” as the loss of belief that is besetting many Americans and that helps explain the rise of Donald Trump and hate-filled political rhetoric. Auden describes “It” as “an outrageous novelty had been introduced/Into our lives”:

     Why were we never warned? Perhaps we were.  
Perhaps that mysterious noise at the back of the brain
We noticed on certain occasions sitting alone
In the waiting room of the country junction, looking
Up at the toilet window was not indigestion
But this Horror starting already to scratch Its way in?
Just how, just when It succeeded we shall never know:
We can only say that now It is there and that nothing
We learnt before It was there is now of the slightest use,
For nothing like It has happened before.

Grim as this is, we must recall that it’s the Advent section of the poem. I’ll describe in a later post how Auden describes the arrival of God’s love in the world. For the moment, we can turn to Jesus’s promise in today’s gospel reading (Luke 21:25-28):

There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

We may sense that, today, we are experiencing some version of the roaring of the sea and the waves. Jesus promises, however, that love can enter and transform our lives. The meaning of Advent is acknowledging the darkness while believing in the light.