From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

In this busy time I want to share with you my favorite Advent reading. Some of you will already be familiar with it and some of you will have known and forgotten it. Others will have this as their first introduction. I hope that it brings you the same joy and hope it always does me.

W.H. Auden, the Anglo-American poet, is known for his intellect, his leftist politics,  his rumpledly, scholarly appearance, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning poem, “The Age of Anxiety.” In the intellectual and secular world, he is less known for what is, perhaps, the finest writing on Christmas one might find: “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.”

At 1,500 lines, it is not a short read. But each line rewards the reader with a moment of new depth, clarity, or insight. It is an obviously faithful piece written with an adult desire to plumb the depths of Christmas meaning.

As is appropriate, he begins with Advent when “darkness and snow descend.”

He moves to the Annunciation:

Today the unknown seeks the known
What I am willed to ask, your own
Will has to answer; child, it lies
Within your power of choosing to
Conceive the Child who chooses you.

The piece of it I love, though, are the passages on the wise men:

I am the star most dreaded by the wise,
For they are drawn against their will to me.

He has the Wise Men complaining about the weather, missing their dogs, and lost.

Says the first Wise Man:

To discover how to be truthful now
Is the reason I follow this star.

Says the second Wise Man:

To discover how to be living now
Is the reason I follow this star.

Says the third Wise Man:

To discover how to be loving now
Is the reason I follow this star.

Then all three say together:

To discover how to be human now
Is the reason we follow this star.

The passage that many most love and remember, from a meditation on Simeon from the poem, is the one I’ll leave you with this week:

And because of His visitation, we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking: our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present. Therefore, at every moment we pray that, following Him, we may depart from our anxiety into His peace.

May this season be our chance to worship, sing, pray, and serve together that we may depart from our anxiety, into His peace. May it be a chance to once again find ourselves caught up not in the fevered pace and pitch of this day, and hour, and minute, but instead, rapt fresh with the timeless eternity of God’s ancient new love again.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert