Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In last Sunday’s sermon, I quoted from a lengthy and amazing poem by WH Auden called “For the Time Being”, and I was reminded of that poem by our Office Reading today from Zechariah. Of course, it wouldn’t take much to remind me, to be honest, of Auden’s poem: it’s an incredibly beautifully, challenging, and powerful work, and I find myself returning to it frequently in these anxious days leading up to Christmas.

In our reading today, the prophet Zechariah sees the return of the exiled people of Judah and declares: “whoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice.” I love that image: the Day of Small Things. It speaks so eloquently to what it means to suffer from a limited imagination of what is possible for God, what it means for us to be incapable of imagining anything apart from what’s right in front us, apart from the smallness of day-to-day life that remains unexposed to grace because grace has not yet occurred to us as a possibility, as a thing our lives are capable of receiving. But if anything should convince us otherwise, if anything should convince us that God desires to reveal God’s own self even in the midst of our day-to-day lives, to fill our smallness with God’s own infinite goodness and expand our imaginations beyond the Day of Small Things to an Endlessness of Rejoicing…if anything should convince us of such wonderful and mysterious stuff, it’s the Incarnation when the Son of God became human for our sake and lovingly filled every aspect of the human experience with his own Godhead.

And so much of Auden’s poem is a wrestling with that Day of Small Things in light of the Incarnation, what it means to live in the Time Being uneasily situated between vision and its fulfillment, in the time when our imaginations are not yet as healed as they might be, and yet not quite as limited as they were.

So as we walk together to Bethlehem, as we approach the manger, as we gather with Shepherds and Magi to adore the King of the Universe asleep on an unkempt bed of straw…and then return to the hustle and bustle of daily life in which the vision of the Mercy yearns to take root and grow, I want to share with you the last part of “For the Time Being” (find it below!) in the hope that it will inform your devotions on the Mystery we are about to celebrate, even as it focuses on what happens in the Mystery’s wake.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+