Advent meditations (and others)
It’s Advent, which means it’s time to read Andrew Hudgins’s poem “The Cestello Annunciation.”
And perhaps it is also time to read Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio? From my Introduction to the poem:
According to the Christian liturgical calendar each year begins with the season of Advent, which uniquely concerns itself with past and future events: it remembers the first coming (“advent”) of the Messiah and looks forward to the day when, as the Nicene Creed puts it, Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” To be a Christian is to live between these two advents, to be thankful for the salvation brought by the first Advent and to be soberly penitent in light of Christ’s inevitable return in judgment. The believer therefore lives poised, as it were, on a cusp, with Before and After falling off on either side of the moment.
This is a major theme of another book that for a time influenced Auden deeply, Paul Tillich’s The Interpretation of History (1936). That work became famous for its treatment of the biblical term kairos, “the fullness of time” or “the appointed time,” which is opposed to kronos (sequential or “clock” time) and — more important for Tillich — logos, the timeless eternal Word. Tillich seeks to describe time not as “mere duration,” “but rather qualitatively fulfilled time, the moment that is creation and fate. We call this fulfilled moment, the moment of time approaching us as fate and decision, kairos.” It comes to us as fate because we have no power to alter or delay its arrival; it comes to us as decision because we must respond in some way to it. This condition is largely what Auden means by “the time being”: to be faced with the necessity of radical choice, but a choice that must be made as a kind of leap of faith, since the fateful moment does not impose an interpretation but rather calls one forth from us.
The greatest of Advent hymns is “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending,” usually attributed to Charles Wesley, though Wesley was adding to lyrics already written by John Cennick. Many hymns are textually fascinating in that way: Started by one person, revised and expanded by another, cut or otherwise altered by the editors of various hymnals — it’s actually difficult to find a famous hymn whose text is precisely the same in every hymnal. Indeed, the more famous the hymn the more likely it is to appear in various versions, and, of course, sung to different tunes in different places. It is said that when Kaiser Wilhelm II came to visit his grandmother Queen Victoria and attended church with her, he was startled when the choir started singing the German national anthem. In fact they were singing John Newton’s “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken,” which is often sung in English-speaking churches to the same great tune by Haydn.
My friend Matt Frost has written the most imaginative and provocative essay I have read on how we might think in new ways about the challenge of major climate change.
Almost twenty years ago, the editors of First Things asked some folks to choose one twentieth-century book of particular importance. The selections continue to be quite interesting, I think, though significantly different than what would have been elicited from people who wrote for the New York Review of Books or the New Republic. I still think I chose well (scroll about 40% of the way down to see my contribution).
The historian John Thorn has discovered a Soviet-era article, in Russian, on the horrors of American sports. One such sport is a “wild massacre,” full of “death, mutilation, blood” — we call it professional wrestling. But scarcely better is another nightmare of barbaric violence and cruelty — Dare we even name it? I think we must. It is called … Beizbol.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: Just sent more edits back to Penguin … almost at the end of the MS Word Period of writing a book, thanks be to God.
- Music: I’ve been listening to a lot of pop music from the Fifties lately, and what intererests me about it is the constant bnlending of what later became distinct generes. Consider Clyde McPhatter’s great song “A Lover’s Question”: R&B meets country meets rock & roll meets rockabilly. A little bit of everything going on there.
- Viewing: We’re on a Preston Sturges kick. More on that soon.
- Food and Drink: Teri brought back some absolutely wonderful liqueurs from her recent visit to Germany — peach, cinnamon — and we’re heartbroken to discover that we can’t buy them in this country. What is international commerce good for, I ask you.
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.