Welcome to the Imagination Redeemed podcast where we follow
the great stories further up and further in In Pursuit of the
Life of Christ. Hello everyone, welcome to the
Imagination Redeem podcast. We hope you all had a very Merry
Christmas and in lieu of a full podcast episode, I'm here today
with Brian Brown to read and have a short reflection on WH
Auden's poem for the time being, a Christmas Oratorio originally
published in 1944. We will be reading a short
selection from this long poem. The poem in its full length are
various monologues from different viewpoints around
Christmas time. This one specifically that we
will be reading is for after Christmas, around New Year's.
So with that short introduction, Brian, would you do us the
honors of of reading said selection?
Sarah, I would be delighted. 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 leftovers 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 8:15 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 in
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 and
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 practice 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. Thank you, Brian.
The time is noon. What a beautiful poem.
I love I I haven't actually read much WH Auden until of late, And
there's something about the driving energy of his voice as a
poet and the herky jerky nature of it, as well as he slices
together with image associations very concrete things that I know
well, like Christmas ornaments and boxes going to the attic,
and these deep theological and philosophical concepts just,
yeah, butting up and hitting each other with commas.
Yeah, it it, it really it, it, it kind of enacts as a poem so
much of how you feel after Christmas.
Because on the one hand there's that frenetic energy and on the
other hand, this sort of let down and everything grinding to
a halt. But knowing it's going to Rev up
again into the hecticness of normalcy.
And behind it all, a whole bunch of thoughts that you, you're not
sure you want to have, you're not sure you want to get into,
you're not sure you want to give space to.
And in your mind and the poem won't let you give space to
them. You'd have to stop reading the
poem and process that amazing thing he just said, or that
poignant thing or that difficult thing.
That's so good and so true. It's maybe this is so cliche to
save a poem, but it is truly an experience and it truly is a
headspace that he gets you into that I have just kind of fallen
in love with this poem, especially this particular year.
One thing that I also think is really beautiful about this
poem, and we'll read it one last time on our way out, is the way
in which I've noticed how Auden is lacing or interlacing into
this poem the Lord's Prayer. And I think that there is
something really beautiful about the the humdrum nature of the
Lord's Prayer, if I may be so bold to say.
The Lord didn't give us this esoteric, really intense and
beautiful soliloquy that we have to perform in a particular way
in order to speak to the God of the universe.
It's very concrete and it's asking for very specific things.
And yet that intermingling of earthly normal with heavenly
participation and heavenly encounter in prayer is something
that we often feel uncomfortable with and is the point of
incarnation. And it is what we're grappling
with after Christmas. While we're in Christmas tide.
We've gone through the sacred day that just didn't feel too
sacred, or didn't feel quite the way it should have, and we have
to jump back into our Kronos time of next thing, next thing,
next thing. I love the the the line.
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep and repair,
irregular verbs to learn the time being to redeem from
insignificance, which I guess is a few lines, but it's that
grappling. And yet it's in that lie, in
those lines that he's also dealing with the Lord's Prayer,
which I think is, I don't know, I'm saying a lot and maybe not
saying anything, but it's so good.
There's, there's, I don't know, there's some.
I think you're saying a lot because sometimes the best thing
you can say to a great piece of art is guys, look at this.
Just just point to it. He's already done the work.
Yeah, well, and if, if you know listeners, if you guys do want
to delve deeper into Auden as a, as a thinker, I can't recommend
highly enough Corey Lotta's book, which I'm actually drawing
a blank on the name at the moment, but our, our friend
Corey has, has written a great book on a theology of time in,
in the thought of Lewis and Auden.
And so actually, and some of the some of the philosophical ideas
that ended up in there in this poem, but they're also in a lot
of the work of of CS Lewis and how we understand what we do in
time as eternal beings. So if you want to get
philosophical in a manageable kind of way, it's a great book.
It is called when the eternal can be met.
Thank you. But the very long subtitle I
will not read. Yes.
Well, Brian, thank you so much for diving into this poem that
we've only scratched the surface of.
Are there any things that we want to let our listeners know
about before we close out the year?
And then once we do that, I would love it for you to take us
out with the poem one last time. Sure.
Yeah. So just a few days left in the
year. If this podcast has meant
something to you this year, we would be incredibly grateful if
you'd go to anselmsociety.org and make an end of your gift,
because it's only because of your gifts that this is
possible. So we're, we've been pretty
blown away by the number of you who have followed us this year,
the number of you have told us that we turned up as your number
one podcast in your Spotify raps.
We grew 400% this year listener wise, it's been, it's been quite
a year and a lot of you are are now giving to support the show
and we really, really appreciate that.
So if you haven't yet, we would love it if you would join those
numbers at anselmsociety.org. Also, there are enough topics
that we talked about on the show a lot that we felt deserved
their own extended treatment, particularly on a, on a, on a
foundational level, that I have finally caved to the inevitable.
And I am starting in mid January teaching a six week online
course on the Christian imagination.
It's kind of the my best attempt at the foundations of everything
drawing from a whole bunch of these ancient sources.
I've been teaching this course for in a face to face context
for as a multi day experience for years, but I haven't been
able to adapt it into something that you guys online could
experience until now. So tickets are available again
on anselmsociety.org for that and they are going insanely
fast. So jump in there if you want to
join us for that. OK, let's listen to somebody
much more interesting than me one more time.
Here we go again. This is for the time being, a
Christmas oratorio, which I'm just now processing fully, is
written at the height of World War 2.
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 leftovers 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 8:15 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 in
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 and
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 practice 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 will be done, that in spite
of her prayers, God will cheat no one, not even the world of
its triumph. The Imagination Redeemed podcast
is a production of the Anselm Society.
It's easy to see this world as disenchanted and to give up hope
that there's more. But you were made to see the
world with the eyes of heaven and to live a bountiful life
that participates in the life of God like in the great stories.
To help make this show possible, go to anselmsociety.org/podcast
25 and make a donation. The Anselm Society is a place
where you can come in and experience that beauty, joyful
celebration, and ancient wisdom and go out renewed, bringing
that life to your vocation, home, and church.
Learn more at anselmsociety.org and join us next time as we
pursue a renaissance of the Christian imagination together.