IRONIC ADVENT MEDITATION #11: AUDEN ADVENT

 
AUDEN ADVENT

I may have learned "ironic advent" as a concept (though he never used the phrase)from W. H. Auden. I bought a copy of his Collected Longer Poems when I was an undergraduate. For some pretentious reason or another. That book is a treasure. It had a shaping power, like all the best poetry. I especially loved and still love For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (written during wartime, 1941-1942). Edwin, and Jennifer, and I kept threatening to organize a reading of it for Advent season until they moved to Kentucky. Traitors! 

I welcome as my second favorite guest advent ironist*, Wystan Hugh(I like to say Huge, and I like to think he would like that) Auden. 

Here are two pieces from the "Advent" section of For the Time Being.** I wrote what I think was a really good undergraduate poem under the influence of the second of these choruses. I can't even remember the name of my poem, but I know that I pretentiously wrote "for W.H. Auden" under the unremembered title. I've also given this book away to people whom, I thought, needed it. I can't remember if they said thank you.

Some words from one of my true loves.  

      I

   CHORUS

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.

   III

  CHORUS

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood

Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,

Dreading to find its Father lest it find

The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:

Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.

Where is that Law for which we broke our own,

Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned

Her hereditary right to passion, Mind

His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone. 

Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.

Was it to meet such grinning evidence

We left our richly odoured ignorance? 

Was the triumphant answer to be this? 

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss. 

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.

*Jennifer was my favorite guest ironist, but that's because she's my friend, whereas Auden is just my pretend friend.

**I have no damn legal right to these lines except the rights of love. Send the police to fetch me in Huntington, Indiana. 

my copy looks just like this

Ironic Advent Meditation: Anything Useful (by Jennifer Woodruff Tait)

 

Anything Useful: 
a guest meditation by 
Jennifer Woodruff Tait (on her birthday)







 Joe Martyn Ricke and M Richard Miller, this poem is all your fault.

If you came to church for anything useful today,
forget it.

Anything practical: 
three points to help you in the Monday workplace, 
two tips for witnessing to your coworkers, 
five guides to a good marriage.

If you came to church for the hats, 
coffee, 
cookies, 
friends, 
family, 
cheese, 
pew cushions, 
happy songs, 
warm feelings,
or even a blessing, 
forget it.


This is the first Sunday of Advent.

Lo, He comes with clouds descending, once for ransomed sinners slain.

The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.

IRONIC ADVENT MEDITATION 2014 #3: TRANSVERSE ADVENT

Transverse Advent

I’m seriously into Pope Francis, these days. Especially reading his speeches and homilies (which seem to average about one a day). His speech to the Council of Europe last week featured a discussion of the present state of European culture as featuring the challenge of transversality. And he want beyond lamenting this fact to suggesting a path forward (if not an outright solution). 

By transversal, at root a mathematical concept but one more and more common in humanist dialogue about religion, culture, feminism, psychology, and rationality itself, he seems to mean that we can no longer take any sort of “universality” for granted. At least for the purposes of dialogue. 

Obviously this is true in contemporary Europe (and, to a lesser degree, in the United States). The Pope specifically drew on his meetings with political leaders, observing that “the younger politicians view reality differently than their older colleagues.” 

Of course, the differences are more than just generational, but this is a key point, often lost in the more obvious anxieties over religious differences or party lines (and, indeed, to keep the imagery, cutting across them). Pope Francis continued, "We need to take into account this transversality encountered in every sector. To do so requires engaging in dialogue, including intergenerational dialogue." In conclusion, Francis said, "Were we to define the continent today, we should speak of a Europe in dialogue, one which puts a transversality of opinions and reflections at the service of a harmonious union of peoples."

This, like other things Pope Francis has said and done, put me in mind of Albert Camus’ speech in a monastery after World War II, published later as “What the World Expects of Christians.” The title itself sounds rather like a demand or, at least, a one-way movement (the world has a right to expect something from Christian but not vice versa). In fact, though, what he has in mind is something more reciprocal, something more like a “transversality” of values, keeping in full view our many differences of "opinion" (or "truths"), yet bumping up against each other in this particular place and time, finding common ground and common work for the common good. 

Of course, for religious people, all this "common" talk may seem rather mundane, vulgar, even worldly. But it is just this prejudice that Pope Francis, time and again, has called to account. There may be something "beyond" our present, our "common" life lived out here and now, but there is nothing higher or more important. Beyond isn't higher. And least not now, not yet. Theologically--the story of the incarnation, a wonderful story for some of us/an offensive one for some others--speaks of an incredible (yes, many would say unbelievable) intersection of divine pity with human need, a line of hope and love cutting across a seemingly infinite field of suffering and despair. 

For believers (even near agnostic, heavily ironic ones like myself), Advent is the time to remember (in its strong meaning) that love promises to come. And the time to prepare for that special unique coming. What better way to prepare and to be signs on the real plane of earth (not in the heavens, we will leave that to the heavens where we are not) than to engage with our fellow featherless bipeds possessing souls in common dialogue and, where possible, common work. 

And we shouldn't be any stingier or more narrow in the way we think about and go about that than was the one we still ironically await and yet who has already come. He risked everything, especially his religiosity in the eyes of the leaders of his day, to share our dirty skin, to sit with the woman in Samaria, to protect the woman caught in adultery about to the stoned, to feed the hungry (and to cry over the religious powers).

Of course, if you believe the sources (or Paul, at least), he also preached a religious message of conversion including heaven, hell, sin, and salvation. But two things about that must be noted. First, he did NOT have to rescue women, heal lepers, feed hungry folks, and all the rest to preach the message. But he did. Secondly, if Matthew got it right, Love preached something about how our work feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoner, clothing the needy, housing the homeless, and caring for the sick is specifically linked to that conversion stuff. Like, you can't have one without the other. 

Where do we, then, find values that intersect with the needs of our age and the voices of our contemporaries whose traditions, perspectives, and practices are different than our own? That list in Matthew 25 should give us a good place to start. We've got most of a month yet to  get to work on those before we really have to start worrying about any others. 

But, in the spirit of "transversality," let me give Camus the almost final word(s). 

What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping of men/women resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally....

We are faced with evil. And, as for me, I feel rather as Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said: "I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere." But it is also true that I, and a few others, know what must be done; if not reduce evil, at least not to add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.

And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great unequal battle has begun. I have nothing but reasonable illusions as to the outcome of that battle. But I believe it must be fought, and I know that certain men/women at least have resolved to do so. I merely fear that they will occasionally feel somewhat alone, that they are in fact alone....

It may be that Christianity ... will insist on losing once and for all the virtue of revolt and indignation that belonged to it long ago. In that case Christians will live and Christianity will die.... What I know--which sometimes creates a deep longing in me--is that if Christians made up their minds to it, millions of voices--millions, I say--throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals who, without any sort of affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and for men/women.

Nothing Camus says, though, really will make much difference. Neither will the words of Pope Francis. Or, excuse, my French, the words of Jesus.  That will be up to me. And you. I wish I could say it would be easy. Well, I guess I can, if I wanted to. But I won't. But I know what it will look like. This. 

 

Ironic Advent Meditation 2014 #2: Advent Equations

ADVENT EQUATIONS

I once got a note to this effect--
"Sorry I've been so busy and out of contact.
By the time you get this, I'll be leaving on a plane across the ocean.
I am scheduled to return the day after you leave for England. 
I really miss you." 

This formula explains a lot. Perhaps, including Advent. 

"Don't be too disappointed if you keep being disappointed."
Browning said something like that, or should have. 

"The human soul cannot subsist on the scanty satisfactions reality affords." 
Freud said that, or I did, and I played Freud once in a play. 

These are subjective facts, special case equations, NOT to be shared with children. 

With children, instead, prove all of the above false. 

You have twenty-three days, relatively speaking. 

Go. 

Ironic Advent Meditation 2014 #1 SIGNS

 









SIGNS

  
It’s cold and dark and I haven’t eaten all day (unless coffee is food), typically when I do my best work.

I know that Jennifer and Jennifer and maybe Jennifer (pretty much everyone I know is named Jennifer) were just dying to read my newest series of  Ironic Advent Meditations, although somehow they repressed their anxiety and didn’t say a dang thing about it.

I’m sick of Advent already, and it’s only the second day of.

Wait a minute, you say, it’s not the second day of Advent. It’s just the first day of Advent. Today is December the first and my Starbucks Advent Calendar starts today and ends on the 25^th, Christmas Day. Everybody knows that December first is the first day of Advent.

I’m looking at you right now like who are you? Some victim of a Disney ESPN ABC Starbucks Macys brain implant? A Presbyterian? A reader of blogs? A lover of Pumpkin Spice anything? A person who can say “Johnny Football” sans irony? For that matter, someone who can say “sans irony” sans irony?

Just to set the record straight, Sunday November 30^th, also known as yesterday, was the First Sunday of Advent. The first day of Advent. Today is the second day of Advent, no matter what your neo-evangelical “Guidebook to a Happy, Healthy, non-Catholic Advent” states in one of its many snappy prose-poems about the baby and the donkey and such.

As I said, I haven’t eaten. And I drove a long way yesterday, no longer than you are thinking right now, through gloom and darkness, away from my children in New York City, towards my big empty house in Indiana, with a dog in the back seat who was suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (also known as, "when I said she likes carrots I didn’t mean to just feed her nothing butt for the entire weekend").

So, not only am I more than usually grouchy, but I missed church on the First Sunday of Advent. Instead of prayers, readings, and communion, I drove through the whelming dark listening to football and a Sabbath’s worth of commercials for the millions and millions of things we must have to celebrate whatever it is people think they are celebrating when they run out desperately and buy so many important things. If only one of those commercials had told me what to buy in case of acute canine diarrhea, I would have been thankful. 

Which reminds me of something I heard on the radio yesterday. Some commercial for something actually referred to it as “Black Friday Weekend.” I suppose that’s not much worse than Turkey Day, which I also hear a lot of, but it certainly got me in a bad mood. Don’t judge me. Judge yourself if that doesn’t get you in a bad mood. You’re the one with the brain implant that makes you think that Advent starts on the 1^st and who’s carrying Macy’s shopping bags that say “BELIEVE!”

Whether it’s really true or not, I told myself that it was OK if I missed church yesterday. After all, I know the drill for the First Sunday of Advent. 

“There will be signs in the moon and stars. Scary things will happen everywhere. 

Two will be in Macy’s shopping; one will be taken and one will have to pay the bill.

The sky, not to mention Friday, will turn black. 

You never know when the thief will return, and brothers and sisters, in this very very strange passage, the thief is the Lord (not a very cute little Disney baby either). Everything will be shaken, even heaven, and that which isn’t, ain’t worth keeping. 

And nobody, I mean nobody, knows the exact time or season, except Starbucks, because they have a 25 day Advent Calendar you can buy someone as an “Advent Gift.”

 

Or something like that. 

“There will be signs."

Late Saturday, just before it got really dark, we were standing together at Noel's grave. Joann, Krista, Lauren, and I held hands and prayed the Lord's Prayer. Someone I love once told me it was the greatest prayer because even when you're not sure what you believe in anymore, you know you still need food. If she hadn't turned and walked away (as was her wont), I would have added, yeah, and forgiveness. 

We all slowly moved away, saying goodbye to Noel until the next time. Annie and her kids had recently brought some pretty flowers (also signs that the universe possibly contains love)  that were still there despite the snow and rain since. Terribly, she lost her husband, Sam, just a few months after Noel died. A hawk flew over our head and startled us all for a moment.

Before we get in the car, Joann says, somebody had a dream about Sam. Somebody who hardly knew him. He was dressed in work clothes like he had some work to do. And he said to tell Annie he was sorry he had made a mistake. 

At his funeral, she said, there was a hawk that kept flying overhead. Then at Milly's soccer games, a hawk would always fly around during the game. When did hawks ever do that? And there always seemed to be one hanging around in their back yard. 

I guess I was supposed to gather from this that they thought maybe this was some kind of sign. That he was still with them. I don't know. Pretty far out there. But, to tell the truth, not terribly more so than some of the Advent stuff I'm supposed to believe.

I left Noel's with a even deeper sign engraved in my skin. He was always working on the house, and one of his many projects was finishing off their basement. 

So, while Lauren and I were visiting on Saturday, I rumbled down to the basement, doing my best Tigger imitation,  to see what Kev was doing, hoping to engage him in some good ol' uncle-nephew quality time. Instead I rammed my tender scalp into the solid wood beam Noel had left in the ceiling above the stairway, which at about 5' 10" and with just that precise angle meant a sharp and deep cut in the top of my head, exactly where I semi-ducked at the last minute. 

Kevin didn't look up from his video game. I came up from the basement bleeding, holding my head. Everyone freaked out, gave me paper towels, ice, ibuprofen, a few seconds of concern, and then, obviously, topped it off with sarcasm.

So, the real scene at the grave was something more like this:  My bloody wound covered with a couple of paper towels and a bag of ice wrapped up in a dish cloth held tightly to my head by my stylish scarf tied under my chin. It was hard to be as serious as I should have been, especially every time someone looked at me and snickered. And, of course, I looked that ridiculous while Joann told me the serious stories of hawk visitations.

This was the true vigil of the First Day of Advent. For me, the start of another ironic Advent. Bleeding from a head wound, with a paper towel jutting out from my head like a weird visor, holding hands with loved ones at my brother's grave, angry at him for leaving, and also for leaving the low beam in the stairway, praying for food and forgiveness, as the darkness fell. Trying to feel the true spirit of Black Friday weekend. 

Scary things will happen everywhere. There will be signs. Hawks hover, perhaps for good. A bloody wound from your brother a year after he's gone. Time is relative. You don't know when the thief will come, but when he does, he'll probably be a baby. Or a hawk.

Hold hands. Pray for food. And forgiveness.

Learn how to count the days. 

Feast of the Transfiguration; Whatever

Transfiguration; whatever.

     It’s the feast of the transfiguration (supply your own damn caps if it means that much to you). I don’t know who exactly is feasting, but one assumes this is super (maybe even, trans-) important to the Orthodox, pretty dang important to the Roman Catholics, and totally unheard of by the Mennonites. The Baptists don’t believe in it because it isn’t in the Bible. Oh, it is? OK then, the Baptists believe in it, but like the Mennonites, they’ve never heard of it. It’s not in Romans.

     Then, of course, there are the Japanese. They have reason to hate this day, and perhaps all such bright and shiny metamorphoses. Thanks to some atheist scientists (one dreams) and a Baptist politician (one knows), a few hundred thousand Hiroshimans lit up on August 6, 1945. I like to imagine a Christian missionary talking to them about the transfiguration. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, just, perhaps, not ethical.

     I don’t get the transfiguration, except as a trope. I mean, I get the obsession with back lighting and transmogrification and all, it’s just that I’ve seen and it doesn’t appeal to me. Peter Jackson pretty much ruined all that in The Fellowship of the Ring, trying to channel the numinous with digital tricks and voice modulators. Now Ian McKellen and Cate Blanchett are forever stuck in my mind with a really bad youth group leader I used to know who would always perform the role of Satan in church plays by running his voice through some stupid filter from hell. “Give me the ring. After all, look how tall and scary I just got!” Oooooooh.  

     Transfiguring, transmogrifying, choose your gerund—that’s pretty much an everyday thing around here these days. Vampires, wizards, animagi, steroids, boob jobs, facelifts, facejobs, boob lifts, computer effects, filters (visual, aural), airbrushing, facebook alter-egos, memoir writers, viagra, chip memory implants (does that happen yet?). It’s not a one-time thing on a mountain anymore; that was bad enough as far as I’m concerned. Now it’s just as mundane as . . . the mundane, only shinier or fuller or skinnier (depending upon the figure you are trying to trans).

     That whine isn’t anything necessarily new. Most of us can agree that these false transfigurations can take our eyes away from the real one. What though of the real one? If that even means anything, really. Jesus went up on a mountain and all of a sudden he’s surrounded by Moses and Galadriel and Plato’s chair and Beatrice and lots of other things either floating down from the sky or doing that Star Trek transporter thing? Alright. What now? Other than another opportunity to make Peter out to be a bit of a buffoon, what are we to take away from this? What does it mean, meaningfully (not even to mention mean physically or Physics-ly)?

     What worries me is that it’s someone’s attempt to sneak Plato in the mountaintop back door of the gospel. We live our lives, Jesus lived his (they say), on the dirty ground of Palestine, animal pee and shit pretty much wherever he stepped, human shit on the rest. Subject to cutting, bruises, passion, sweating, laughter, liver failure, crucifixion, erotic attraction, the urge to dance, hunger, sleepiness, inexplicable happiness, doubt, and the need to go. I like that Jesus. I don’t think I’m going all Ricky Bobby on this or anything. If I’m not supposed to like that Jesus, I don’t get the incarnation as an idea or a practice. I want to curl up and sleep at his feet, assuming he wouldn’t want to snuggle with the likes of me. And tell him every day—“Master, Rabbi, whatever whomever you are,(whatever name I use, I know that Matthew and John will fix it later when they edit), this world makes sense to me when I am with you. I’m not getting all of this. I might not even be getting most of it. I might not ever get much more than this. But if this is what it means to love G*d and man, then I am walking with you. Everything looks different because of you.”   

     You see what I did there? I know you did. That’s because I am only giving this meditation to people who care about such things. (God, words, thinking, etc.). Jesus transfigured the world, at least as I understand the story. NOT by bringing down Plato’s ideals or turning up his divine nose on the everyday, the mundane, the wedding feast, the farmed field, the noisy child, the noisy blind man, the noisy crowd, the nosey rich young ruler. But by making it all holy, if not shiny.

     He transfigured the prisoner, the hungry, the naked, the Samaritan, the Japanese, young adult novelists, the cattle at his nativity, not to mention the young woman about to be slaughtered by the Taliban. He took on our skin and told us to look for him in the rough and ragged creatures of mother earth.

     So, what’s up with this mountaintop version of The Shining? “Heeeeeeere’s Jeeeesus!” Don’t read ahead, because I refuse to come up with a facile answer. it’s not like I know, pretend to know, or want to know. Unless I discover that it’s all a big mistake, which would be alright.

     Two years ago I took a long walk. Repeat after me: no, longer than you are thinking right now. I saw and felt and heard and touched so many wonderful things of this earth. Tainted, for sure. Wrinkled, quite often. Drunk, the Germans precisely. Snoring? Oh my Platonic One, the snoring. Blistered? Badly. Transfigured? Hmmm. Well there was that one late afternoon on a bridge over a little stream with my head in the lap of the virgin mary who fed me blackberries and looked in to my eyes and said, “I’m sorry, but this will be as good as it ever gets, but you’ve got to admit it’s pretty damned good.” And I do. And she walked away into a sunset and it was almost kind of like the transfiguration.           Otherwise, shiny Jesus was there only in his absence. In the agnostic prayers, the breaking of the bread, the cheap Spanish wine, the footrub from a friend who couldn’t speak my language, the cows of Galicia. I assume he was there in a number of adulterous women, but for good or bad, I never found out.

     There were mountains. Lots of them. They were beautiful, gracious, and merciless. I didn’t need shiny Jesus or Peter Jackson to convince me that the world is charged with the grandeur of something or someone. And, of course, it’s a bitch.In and of itself. And, often and especially, when we try to transfigure it ourselves (by transmogrification or, more tragically, by nuclear fission). 

     Today I took a shorter walk. Not that short. Three or four miles at least. But I walked by my best friends’ house. Jennifer and Edwin. It looked like an empty house. Because it is, I guess. Because they moved to Kentucky. But when they were there, at least much of the time, it reminded me of a burning bush that would not be consumed. The mental energy in and on them, and by extension, in that place would have made William Blake . . . say something Blakean about it. That place was transfigured by the human form, divine or not. They were devoted to this Jesus fellow and probably more in tune with all this platonic transfiguration nonsense than I. Excuse my being obviously correct, however, in saying that these lovely creatures (prone not only to wander but also to all sorts of human ridiculousness) might have been pagans or even Calvinists and still have transfigured that place and the lives of those who stepped into their force field (it always comes back to Star Trek, doesn’t it?). And that’s only right, if  . . . .

     Last night I took a genuinely short walk. Knowing my liturgical bent, Rorie the dog intentionally shat three separate piles as we walked around the block (in her defense, it’s a long block). “What the hell are you doing, Rorie the dog,” I exclaimed. She looked at me all like I know you, you talk the shit, but can you handle the shit? Build three tabernacles or convert to Plato or shut your huge mouth giant human. “Say WHAT?” You heard me, she looked, transfigure this. She turned away and didn’t look another word at me. Just that solemn mysterious impenetrable air of hers. The one she has usually after a nice . . . walk.

     So, there you have it. Why the transfiguration creeps me out. Not because it’s all shiny and scary, but because I get it, but I don’t get it. OK, OK. You come from the stars and all. So did Lucifer. Where do we do go from here? Way back in the day, Bob Milham used to get mad at me because I wasn’t more interested in supernatural experiences. He meant visions and transfigurations and such. To me, that’s like Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, in which it turns out that there really are smart, shiny aliens who have come down to us. And . . . they wanted to eat our brains (or something like). That they are out there and shiny, I guess, comforts some people. I want more.

     One final thing about this transfigured Jesus and why he disappoints me. The most amazing thing to me, whatever really happened, of the larger story, and the part that shocks and disturbs in all the right ways (right being defined as, how Joe likes things) is that the resurrected Jesus was pretty much . . . not transfigured (in THAT sense). Yes, he could walk through walls, supposedly. I think one of the disciples did better than that in the Book of Acts (he did some Klingon transport thing, if my interpretation is correct). Maybe both happened; maybe neither, but it’s a zero sum as far as I can see. But that the wounded, bruised (why not?), tortured Jesus, who loved and was loved, who cared and was hated, returned from the realm of the dead (whatever that means) in that maimed form? If I were that missionary in Japan, I would talk about that Jesus, in all his terrible beauty. There is a transfiguration I can care about if not understand. To him I say yes, yes, yes, please be true. There was the human form divine. If Peter hadn’t been running so fast to catch up with the disciple whom Jesus loved, he probably would have tried to build some tabernacles. I think I’ll just go down and visit Edwin and Jennifer in Kentucky instead. Or take a long walk.