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.