“THE TEMPTATION OF ST. JOSEPH”
SECTION TWO OF WH AUDEN’S “FOR THE TIME BEING” (FTTB)
(For Second Two, click here)
As I’ve already said previously, this is my favorite section of the entire poem, and a bit of writing/theology that’s been deeply influential to me for thirty years.
Auden’s depiction of Joseph here, to me, is spot on for what he must have no doubt been experiencing.
For the first ten years of ministry, during Advent, I preached some kind of sermon about Joseph —often as if it was a first person narrative of him speaking— and a lot of the overall character traits were 100% borrowed from FTTB.
To grasp the full power of the characterization, you have to put yourself back into Joseph’s historical time/place (best we can) and also recognize and remember a key difference between the visitations to Mary and the visitations to Joseph.
Luke depicts Mary’s encounter as some kind of real-world, awakened-world, encounter with the angel.
Joseph’s entire message from God comes him as a DREAM.
And what if the dream is wrong?
What if it was just indigestion, or his own fanciful imagination?
How hard it would be to believe this kind of message, if all you had was a dream?
Add to this, the message is that his intended bride is pregnant, not because of an affair with some other man…but through the Holy Spirit.
(All through this, I will continually invite you to embrace the non-literal sense of these stories…)
Joseph is being asked to not only believe such a thing might be possible…but also to endure the likely ridicule of the entire world.
Yes, it was a misogynistic culture. Yes, the very story speaks to this when Luke tells us Joseph decides not to “put Mary away” as was his highly gendered and sexist right as the man in this story.
But…he didn’t do that. He did something quite profound…
He trusted the dream, and he loved Mary as his Wife, even though no doubt the world imagined him a fool and cuckold.
Many literary scholars have noted that Auden may have also been using Joseph as a stand in for himself here too. Auden was madly n love with another man, and wished to see him as a husband (again: remarkable for 1941, yes?)
But…that lover was in fact “unfaithful” to Auden…or perhaps better said, just never saw the relationship the same way Auden did…
So…Auden too was working through his own issues with this section.
I apologize or the length of what follows…but I really do want you to get sense of the power of this section, and I’ll do that by citing large sections of it.
Many contemporary Feminist/Womanist theologians today might well say something like: “masculinity, To Nature, is a non-essential luxury…”
Auden wrote/thought this, in 1941.
Mary and God are the stars. Traditional CIS Gendered Straight Men?
Not super important. Joseph’s role is to follow, not lead….
The narrative begins with Joseph enjoying an average day at a neighborhood bar. He comes home to discover the news that apparently everybody already knows and is already gossiping about. While he describes his own feelings, the “Chorus,” the chattering, gossiping folks around him, say this:
“Joseph, you have heard What Mary says occurred;
Yes, it may be so.
Is it likely? No.”
At later….
“Mary may be pure, But, Joseph, are you sure?
How is one to tell?
Suppose, for instance … Well…”
And finally…
“Maybe, maybe not.
But, Joseph, you know what
Your world, of course, will say
About you anyway.”
What the WORLD will say is: Joseph is a fool.
Which leads to a beautiful section of Joseph calling out to God, and being answered by Gabriel, somewhat like Job and that “whirlwind.”
“Where are you, Father, where?
Caught in the jealous trap
Of an empty house I hear
As I sit alone in the dark
Everything, everything,
The drip of the bathroom tap,
The creak of the sofa spring,
The wind in the air-shaft, all
Making the same remark
Stupidly, stupidly,
Over and over again.
Father, what have I done?
Answer me, Father, how Can I answer the tactless wall
Or the pompous furniture now?
Answer them…GABRIEL
No, you must.JOSEPH
How then am I to know, Father, that you are just?
Give me one reason.GABRIEL
No.JOSEPH
All I ask is one
Important and elegant proof
That what my Love had done
Was really at your will
And that your will is Love.GABRIEL
No, you must believe;
Be silent, and sit still.”
Powerful….
Joseph wants a sign…like Mary got…like Elizabeth got…but he will get nothing.
And then, the “Our Townish” narrator drops back in…and delivers an AMAZING soliloquy which really presages much of more modern Feminist thought.
Joseph, Auden more than suggests, is being made to atone for the sins of Misogyny itself.
I’m going to let you read almost the whole thing, because it’s stunning…
“NARRATOR
For the perpetual excuse
Of Adam for his fall—”My little Eve, God bless her, did beguile me and I ate,”
For his insistence on a nurse,
All service, breast, and lap, for giving Fate Feminine gender to make girls believe
That they can save him, you must now atone, Joseph, in silence and alone;
While she who loves you makes you shake with fright,
Your love for her must tuck you up and kiss good night.For likening Love to war, for all
The pay-off lines of limericks in which
The weak resentful bar-fly shows his sting,
For talking of their spiritual Beauty to chorus-girls, for flattering
The features of old gorgons who are rich,
For the impudent grin and Irish charm
That hides a cold will to do harm,
To-day the roles are altered; you must be The Weaker Sex whose passion is passivity.For those delicious memories
Cigars and sips of brandy can restore
To old dried boys, for gallantry that scrawls In idolatrous detail and size
A symbol of aggression on toilet walls,
For having reasoned-“Woman is naturally pure Since she has no moustache,” for having said,
“No woman has a business head,”
You must learn now that masculinity,
To Nature, is a non-essential luxury….Forgetting nothing and believing all,
You must behave as if this were not strange at all.
Without a change in look or word,
You both must act exactly as before;
Joseph and Mary shall be man and wife
Just as if nothing had occurred.
There is one World of Nature and one Life;
Sin fractures the Vision, not the Fact; for
The Exceptional is always usual
And the Usual exceptional.
To choose what is difficult all one’s days
As if it were easy, that is faith. Joseph, praise.”
Again, much more modern theologians of our day are still making these same points about Joseph. Perhaps if Auden were alive today, he’d be using the phrase “Family of Choice” to describe Joseph, Mary, and their little family.
It is indeed worth the meditation of modern Evangelical Christians that the Holy Family is indeed strictly “non-traditional.”
“Blood” is not as important as “relationship,” as Jesus himself would remind us time and again.
My dear friend, Charles Gaby, wrote a song for his step-daughter years ago that gets at this too:
“They say that water ain’t as thick as blood…
But maybe blood, ain’t as thick as love…”
In our time, we have spent so much time debating the role of women. I’m not a woman, so I’m not going to describe this whole, tortured history.
But I will say this: A part of why women’s roles and rights are still so much debated in our world is because MEN have yet to really come to terms with their changing roles.
Men truly need to wrestle with these big questions:
— What would mean to have marriages that are true partnerships? Where couples assign family roles based on our natural gifts and graces, and not assumed gendered ones?
— What would it mean for men to be a partner to our spouses and follow their lead…to stand back as they shine…to realize their own, independent wills, careers, and visions?
— What would it means for us to not “mansplain” every single little thing?
Friends, perhaps why I identify so much with Joseph here is that his kind of role is a model for what I’ve tried to be in marriage to my wife of 30 years.
When Dennise and I got married we looked around and realized that the kind of true partnership we intended to have would be hard work, precisely because: we had so few “role models” we could look too.
Even our own families…her’s and mine…far too often assumed so many gendered roles for us.
There were many times when I picked Maria up from school, or attended parent functions…where I was the only man in the room…and all the other Mom’s looked at me like I was a Martian.
There were times when career women…in both the law and the church…said or did stupid, stupid things that reinforced the very gendered roles that cause women so many career problems in the first place.
Women —career women and stay at home moms— were often the MOST baffled by what we were trying to do.
Men…mostly stayed silent, as men do…allowing them to not have to really consider the full weight of societal changes around them. Women shifted…argued…undercut each other.
Men mostly pretended not to notice.
The early years were super hard in this regard. We were navigating cultural differences….and we were navigating these kinds of gendered differences.
Many many times, we would say to ourselves: “This stuff is hard, because we have so few role models.”
Dennise no doubt felt more of those expectations that I did. And we’d be lying if we didn’t admit that sometimes it was just easier to have HER talk to other “Moms” about parenting stuff…play dates, etc…
We’re still in a deeply misogynistic world, for sure. And I sometimes wonder if the younger generation’s obsession with gender pronouns also comes because they see so little evidence, so little progress, breaking through traditional gendered roles in the generations before them.
Sometimes it feels like that what is being critiqued is a hard set of traditional gender roles, and the false belief that a “traditional” marriage must, de facto, reinforce these things.
Women will make the compromises.
Men will “lead.”
All I can tell you is: that’s just wrong. Plenty of folks walking around today are in “traditional” marriages that shatter those older norms.
And so now —speaking for me alone— we sometimes reel both at odd with those older classical “norms,” and also some newer pronoun-centered visions that also seem quite rigid and don’t still ever seem to fit the fullness of human experience.
(Hint: language will never do this…language will always trip us up..always…it must be so, else language…sign and metaphor…be assumed equivalent with actual lived-experienced…)
(Second clarification: I’m also not bashing being pronoun-aware. I’m only suggesting that language sensitivity and gender role changes are two different things; and one never guarantees the other. There are plenty of CIS genders straight folks who consider themselves “He/Him and She/Hers” and are absolutely cross-gendered, if we are assuming traditional gender roles as their assumed model)
OK…long tangent there…
The point is, I’d like to think we are also witnesses to the power of what a true partnership might look like…where some days she is “Mrs Folkerth,” and some days I am “Mr Garcia,” and most days we are neither of those things, but just partners together.
I think we’re here to tell you that is possible.
And if, in some small way, we’re now role models for a next generation, that will be wonderful trail to have walked all these years.
Auden imagines a world where this becomes….ORDINARY.
It is not ordinary…it still is not…not 30 years after our marriage..not 80 years after this was written.
But what if we acted like it was?!
What if we assumed traditional families were ok?
Traditional families in non-traditional gendered roles?
Non-traditional families, lesbians and gay men, in traditional families?
Families of choice, which is what The Holy Family were, creating their own beautiful sense of “home?”
What if we acted as if it was normal for women to lead and men to follow…or for couples to switch off “leading?”
And what of all this was “ordinary?”
Imagining a world where all this becomes ordinary…this is how Auden ends things.
This section of FTTB ends with a series of prayers for common folks.
Think Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender.”
In fact, the last section here is just like Browne’s line “say a prayer for the pretender…”
Say a prayer for the common, ordinary, life…that is, in fact extraordinary.
Auden says it this way, speaking of Mary and Joseph, of all common folk like them, in every age:
“Blessed Woman, Excellent Man,
Redeem for the dull
Average Way
That common ungifted
Natures may
Believe that their normal
Vision can
Walk to perfection.”
Section Four: “The Summons“