Joy of Life Revealed in Love’s Creation

Bartolome Esteban Murillo

Spiritual Sunday – New Year’s Day

Celebrate the New Year by remembering God’s new creation! As today’s Gospel reading involves the shepherds, I have pulled out the shepherd sections from W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. Standing in for the lower classes and for body rather than intellect, the shepherds find in Christ’s birth the meaning and full personhood they have been longing for.

The Gospel reading involving shepherds is Luke 2:15-20:

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. 

Auden, who had leftist sympathies, sees the shepherds as striving to hold their own in a world where the wealthy want them to remain poor and leftist parties want them to donate their lives to the revolution. The shepherds, reframed as industrial workers, know they are seen as cogs and sometimes feel so beaten down by the machinery that they contemplate suicide. But they consider themselves to be worthy of respect and rejoice at the Angels’ declaration that God’s Love has taken human form:

The First Shepherd: The winter night requires our constant attention,
   Watching that water and good-will,
Warmth and well-being, may still be there in the morning.  
The Second Shepherd: For behind the spontaneous joy of life
There is always a mechanism to keep going,  
The Third Shepherd: And someone like us is always there.
The First Shepherd: We observe that those who assure us their education
   And money would do us such harm,
How real we are just as we are, and how they envy us,  
   For it is the centerless tree
And the uncivilized robin who are the truly happy,  
   Have done pretty well for themselves:  
The Second Shepherd: Nor can we help noticing how those who insist that  
   We ought to stand up for our rights,
And how important we are, keep insisting also  
   That it doesn’t matter a bit
If one of us gets arrested or injured, for  
   It is only our numbers that count.  
The Third Shepherd: In a way they are right,
The First Shepherd: But to behave like a cogwheel
   When one knows one is no such thing,  
The Second Shepherd: Merely to add to a crowd with one’s passionate body,
   Is not a virtue.  
The Third Shepherd: What is real
About us all is that each of us is waiting.  
The First Shepherd: That is why we are able to bear
Ready-made clothes, second-hand art and opinions
And being washed and ordered about;  
The Second Shepherd: That is why you should not take our conversation
   Too seriously, nor read too much
Into our songs;    
The Third Shepherd: Their purpose is mainly to keep us
   From watching the clock all the time.  
The First Shepherd: For, though we cannot say why, we know that something
   Will happen:  
The Second Shepherd: What we cannot say,  
The Third Shepherd: Except that it will not be a reporter’s item
   Of unusual human interest;  
The First Shepherd: That always means something unpleasant.  
The Second Shepherd: But one day or
   The next we shall hear the Good News,   

 
II    

Shepherds:
Levers nudge the aching wrist;  
   “Thou are free  
   Not to be,  
   Why exist?”
Wheels a thousand times a minute  
   Mutter, stutter,  
“End the self you cannot mend,
Did you, friend, begin it?”  
   And the streets
   Sniff at our defeats.
Then who is the Unknown
Who answers for our fear
As if it were His own,
So that we reply
Till the day we die;
“No, I don’t know why,
But I’m glad I’m here”? 

   
III  

Chorus of Angels:  
Unto you a Child,
A Son is given.
Praising, proclaiming
The ingression of Love,
Earth’s darkness invents
The blaze of Heaven,
And frigid silence
Meditates a song;
For great joy has filled
The narrow and the sad,
While the emphasis
Of the rough and big,
The abiding crag
And wandering wave,
Is on forgiveness:
Sing Glory to God
And good-will to men,
All, all, all of them.
Run to Bethlehem.    
Shepherds:  
Let us run to learn
How to love and run;
Let us run to Love.
Angels:
Now all things living,  
Domestic or wild,  
With whom you must share  
Light, water, and air,  
And suffer and shake  
In physical need,  
The sullen limpet,  
The exuberant weed,  
The mischievous cat,  
And the timid bird,  
Are glad for your sake  
As the new-born Word  
Declares that the old  
Authoritarian  
Constraint is replaced  
By His Covenant,  
And a city based  
On love and consent  
Suggested to men,  
All, all, all of them.  
Run to Bethlehem.
Shepherds:
Let us run to learn
How to love and run;
Let us run to Love.
Angels:
The primitive dead
Progress in your blood,
And generations
Of the unborn, all
Are leaping for joy
In your veins today
When the Many shall,
Once in your common
Certainty of this    
Child’s lovableness,
Resemble the One,
That after today
The children of men
May be certain that
The Father Abyss
Is affectionate
To all Its creatures,
All, all, all of them.
Run to Bethlehem.

Later in the oratorio, the shepherds arrive at the manger along with the wise men. The two groups alternate in a dialogue between intellect and body. Each men in each group need Love in their own way and each, in humility, ask forgiveness. The Wise Men regret the arrogance that sets them apart, the shepherds the resentment that eats away at their hearts:

First Shepherd: We never left the place where we were born,  
Second Shepherd: Have only lived one day, but every day,  
Third Shepherd:  Have walked a thousand miles yet only worn
The grass between our work and home away.  
First Shepherd: Lonely we were though never left alone.  
Second Shepherd: The solitude familiar to the poor  
Is feeling that the family next door,  
The way it talks, eats, dresses, loves, and hates,  
Is indistinguishable from one’s own.  
Third Shepherd: Tonight for the first time the prison gates
Have opened.  

First Shepherd: Music and sudden light  
Second Shepherd: Have interrupted our routine tonight,  
Third Shepherd: And swept the filth of habit from our hearts.  
Shepherds: O here and now our endless journey starts.  
Wise Men: Our arrogant longing to attain the tomb,
Shepherds: Our sullen wish to go back to the womb,  
Wise Men: To have no past.  
Shepherds: No future,  
All:  Is refused.  
And yet, without our knowledge,
Love has used
Our weakness as a guard and guide.  
                                                     We bless  
Wise Men: Our lives’ impatience.  
Shepherds: Our lives’ laziness,  
All: And bless each other’s sin, exchanging here  
Wise Men: Exceptional conceit  
Shepherds: With average fear.    
All: Released by Love from isolating wrong,
Let us for Love unite our various song,
Each with his gift according to his kind
Bringing this child his body and his mind.

III  

Wise Men: Child, at whose birth we would do obsequy
For our tall errors of imagination,
Redeem our talents with your little cry.  
Shepherds: Clinging like sheep to the earth for protection,
We have not ventured far in any direction:  
   Wean, Child, our ageing flesh away  
   From its childish way.  
Wise Men: Love is more serious than Philosophy
Who sees no humor in her observation
That Truth is knowing that we know we lie.  
Shepherds: When, to escape what our memories are thinking,
We go out at nights and stay up drinking,  
   Stay then with our sick pride and mind  
   The forgetful mind.  
Wise Men: Love does not will enraptured apathy;  
Fate plays the passive role of dumb temptation  
To wills where Love can doubt, affirm, deny.  
Shepherds: When, chafing at the rule of old offenses,
We run away to the sea of the senses,  
   On strange beds then O welcome home  
   Our horror of home.  
Wise Men:   Love knows of no somatic tyranny;
For homes are built for Love’s accommodation
By bodies from the void they occupy.  
Shepherds: When, exhausting our wills with our evil courses,
We demand the good-will of cards and horses,
   Be then our lucky certainty
   Of uncertainty.  
Wise Men:   Love does not fear substantial anarchy,
But vividly expresses obligation
With movement and in spontaneity.  
Shepherds: When, feeling the great boots of the rich on our faces,
We live in the hope of one day changing places,  
   Be then the truth of our abuse  
   That we abuse.  
Wise Men:   The singular is not Love’s enemy;
Love’s possibilities of realization
Require an Otherness that can say I  
Shepherds: When in dreams the beasts and cripples of resentment
Rampage and revel to our hearts’ contentment,  
   Be then the poetry of hate  
   That replaces hate.  
Wise Men:   Not In but With our time Love’s energy
Exhibits Love’s immediate operation;
The choice to love is open till we die.  
Shepherds: O Living Love, by your birth we are able
Not only, like the ox and ass of the stable,
   To love with our live wills, but love,
   Knowing we love.  
All:   O Living Love replacing phantasy,  
O Joy of life revealed in Love’s creation;  
Our mood of longing turns to indication:  
Space is the Whom our loves are needed by,  
Time is our choice of How to love and Why.

May we open our hearts to the Space and Time that comprise the new year. The choice is ours to love.

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