“THE ANNUNCIATION”
SECTION TWO OF WH AUDEN’S “FOR THE TIME BEING” (FTTB)
(for section one, click here)
Auden locates the Annunciation in “The Garden,” which we seem led to believe is Garden of Eden. In that Garden, each of the four Jungian “Faculties” — Sensation, Feeling, Intuition, and Thought— get a chance to speak.
As a licensed administrator of the MBTI, I have a warm place in my heart for this kind of metaphorical language. Yes, I know MBTI has fallen out of favor, been questioned scientifically, and been supplanted in religious circles by the now more popular Enneagram.
But I’ll continue to maintain that the basic concepts are still just as valid, if not more so, than any newer models that have come along since. You just can’t draw them too literally…as we do with all conceptual models.
I’m lookin’ at you, Enneagram fans…
The types are best seen metaphorically, symbologically, which is what Jung was after in the first place.
Auden suggests that part of humanity’s “Fall” might have been a separation of these faculties….that in a more “perfect” time perhaps they were undivided in our souls:
“Over the life of Man
We watch and wait,
The Four who manage
His fallen estate:
are were Once but one,
Before his act of Rebellion;
We were himself when
His will was free,
His error became our
Chance to be.
Powers of air and fire,
Water and earth,
Into our hands is given
Man from his birth”
It’s an interesting thought, and whatever you take of the Eden story, again, I don’t take this stuff literally….it’s beautiful poetry and theology, friends. Because, don’t we all often feel like we’ve lost something along the way?
My favorite songwriter, Dan Fogelberg, wrote an entire album on this concept: “The Innocent Age,” and his previous song “Along the Road,” speaks to this:
“A part of the heart, gets lost in the learning…somewhere along the road…”
Which gets me to Mary and Gabriel in the Garden.
Gabriel just says one word to start their dialogue:
“Wake.”
They then have a pretty interesting, in which Gabriel says the following:
“Since Adam, being free to choose,
Chose to imagine he was free
To choose his own necessity,
Lost in his freedom,
Man pursues
The shadow of his images:
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.”
That’s right, Auden’s sense is that God is pro-choice.
God is pro-human will.
If we are truly to understand the incarnation as a melding of the divine and the human, this really must be so.
This is the part about belief in God that maddens so many of us…even the most devout of believers. That God could/would “allow” the commingling of “Earth and Heaven.”
Frederick Buechner once put a fine point on it all by describing Jesus’ incarnation as
“Ultimate reality, born with a skull you could crush one handed.”
Does that sound too harsh?
Or…isn’t it just about right to describe how any believe in God feels in our very broken world.
Auden will give Mary additional powerful words later in the narrative. But not here how Auden is drawing out the true power of Mary’s statement to Gabriel in the actual Gospel of Luke:
“…may it be done to me according to your will.”
Mary gets the CHOICE to say yes. God is pro-choice.
I’m sorry, I don’t make the Bible, I just read it…
It’s right there in the Gospel of Luke. And Auden correctly gets at this horrible power of choice that God gives us. Perhaps the abortion debate is but a scientific/theological stand-in for all the other moral debates we OUGHT to be having about the awesome power we humans wield?
The power to destroy millions of humans with one bomb.
The power to restrict the movements of millions more through our generally arbitrary “borderlands.”
The power to use pharmaceuticals to both heal us and addict us.
The power to reshape the Earth itself, and drive it to the brink of crisis.
I mean, forget abortion….that’s just a stand in for all these other ways we human beings wield the power of choice God has given us all.
If we really understand the Incarnation, we’ll see it as not just a “once upon a time story,” but as a message about how all of life, all of our planet, every human being…is touched and grace with the presence of God.
“Ultimately reality, born with a skull you could crush one handed…”
That’s our world. That’s the awesome power we humans wield in our post-Eden world.
Or, as Auden’s Gabriel says:
“it lies Within your power of choosing to
Conceive the Child who chooses you.”
We can choose to love each human, our very planet, as if it’s a holy vessel of God (which it is…) or we can crush any bit of the sacred we see and feel.
That’s the power Jesus’ story teaches us about…and when we get to Herod, we’ll be reminded of the banality and horror of our human choices.
And if you think ALL THIS section is heretical to traditional gender roles, just wait until the NEXT section…my personal favorite: “The Temptation of St. Joseph.”
Next Section: “The Temptation of St. Joseph”