Mulling Auden's Words

Mulling Auden’s words

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I have spent a number of days mulling over a W.H. Auden’s poem. Our present news stories lead us to expect terrorism and war in our future. Such a dour prospect for the future was the sort of feeling conveyed by Auden in his poem entitled September 1, 1939. That was the day Hitler’s forces invaded Poland, and the European portion of the Second World War began. Auden describes the anticipation of gloom that fell on those who heard the news on September 1, 1939. There was a sense that all the diplomacy involved in trying to avoid war was now known to have failed and now whatever one wanted war was on its way. I suspect that many Americans are feeling this way about the future since the San Bernardino massacre. There is a sense that other terrorists will strike. We still debate about what our responsibilities are towards tens of thousands of refugees seeking shelter after the rise of ISIS in the Middle East. The debate about the refugees is actually a separate but connected issue to what one expects regarding terrorism. My suspicion is that those who speak in support of accepting refugees don’t expect a terrorist free future. Will terrorists find their way into our country through refugee populations? Yes, probably they will. But if we close our hearts to those who suffer due to the Middle East wars that in some ways we helped unleash, will the loss caused by our hardening of our hearts be a greater evil than the terrorists can strike? I don’t believe for a moment that anyone believes there won’t be more terrorist strikes. But I do believe that many people wonder about what kind of people we will become when terrorists strike. It is this sort of concern for the future, for how we view the future and how we view our place in the world of humanity that Auden so well expresses as he imagines himself hearing the news of September 1, 1939 while in a dive on 52^nd Street.

            Auden attempts to connect what most of us wish to leave unconnected. He imagines connections between our ordinary lives with the news stories that horrify us. He understands that Hitler and Germany will be the target of future investigations regarding the cause of the Second World War, but after focusing briefly on how the future historians will look back at Luther, and events in German history he describes something he believes every child knows.

He writes: “those to whom evil is done do evil in return”.

            Imagined or real the feelings of having suffered evil began brewing into a toxic mix of bitterness, ambition, hunger for revenge, and a suicidal desire to destroy an enemy even if it meant one’s own destruction. A psychopathic god became the idol. But is such an idol so far removed from any of us once we begin to feel that we have suffered evil? Sin begets sin. Evil begets evil. As we suffer, the temptation is that the toxic brew begins to be mixed in the laboratory of our own psyches and souls. Reason retreats and logic is reduced to the simple formula “those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”

            Auden was a realist. He understood that war could destroy without in the end accomplishing a single good thing. He understood that if Nazi Germany was a lesson in human hubris expressing itself in some sense of superiority so was the human race to build skyscrapers to the skies and lifting our own needs above our neighbors. He understood that if Hitler’s Germany had not kept its promises after Munich but only revealed itself as a nation being constructed by a liar, so were the idle promises of many a man who riding to work on a commuter train promised himself that today he would do his work better and tonight he would love his wife better. We perhaps imagine that such a sense of interconnectedness takes the whole concept too far.

            I am not certain that Auden thought fighting the war was wrong or evil. I rather imagine he thought it might be necessary, but he understood that there was a temptation in going to war that one should forever lose their sense of the purpose for which we live. He finds we live in a difficult world where he writes:

“Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police; we must love one another or die”.

            We inherit a difficult circumstance but the need is to overcome the temptation to be those upon whom evil was inflicted simply allowing ourselves to become the ones in turn who return evil. War tempts us with the ever increasing thirst for retaliation, as we comfort ourselves with the truth that we are fighting evil, but the truth we profess so easily becomes a half-truth of fighting another person’s evil while letting one’s own to be set free of all our ordinary boundaries. War is the unleashing of chaos. We deem commandments and constitutions, every boundary as expendable when we go to war. We must return to the golden rule as an abiding principle to not be forgotten in the midst of our testing. As Auden writes it, “we must love one another or die.”

            St. Paul would surely have said of Auden’s poem that he gets it at least to a degree. Adam sinned and his sin influenced others and his sin led to death and death passed to all because all sinned. It is not the whole story to say Adam sinned and because of original sin we have sinned. No, no, but because Adam sinned and that sin led to death so death spread to all, because we all have sinned. That is the interconnection between the horrible sin and the mundane one of the husband who promises to himself that he will be a better husband when he gets home in the evening. The casual sin leads to the habit of sin and leads us away from the nobility that might have been. The terrible nature of sin is not in the sins we do, but in the good we are turned away from doing. That is the beauty of Auden’s stunning line – “we must love one another or die.” It is not the sins we do that destroys humanity but the failure to love one another is what destroys humanity.

            War is perhaps the most horrific symbol of the cycle of failing to love one another leading to death. One sin and insult and hurtful deed leads to a reprisal until the millions die their deaths and the world is covered in human blood. After a time we forget where the cycle began and we lose hope for the cycle to end. From the Christian perspective the cycle ultimately brings death to every man. Except that it doesn’t. That is the story of Advent. We wait for a Savior who is to come and do battle with sin and with death.

            The story reaches a climax on Good Friday. The multitudes, the Roman rulers, the religious leaders of his day gather their combined forces to bring an end to a man who dared to describe himself as a future ruler of a heavenly kingdom. They gathered their forces to put an end to the usurper. They targeted him for death. What would he do? The rule of the game was that those to whom evil is done do evil return. This had been the human game from the time of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, bloody war upon bloody war. But the game changed that day. To the one whom evil was done, came a prayer for forgiveness, an expression of love. He brought with him a new hope and became a new Adam with a sense that now a new way of playing the game had come. Now the new rule is the ancient rule rediscovered and energized, “we must love one another or die.” He became a new Adam representing a new way, a new humanity, a humanity that suffered evil and returned good, who suffered evil unto death only to express love and forgiveness to life.

            In the hierarchy of our obligations to God and man it is easy to place a wedge between our responsibilities to God and to man, with a hierarchy of importance upon our love of God. But the hierarchy was shattered with God becoming man, so that now we show our love of God primarily and most continually by showing our reverence to the God we cannot see by embracing and showing love to the man or woman, whom we can see in their human forms from the beginning created in God’s image. The hierarchy of values of loving God above loving man has been replaced with a new name summing up our relationship to God – “Immanuel, God with us.” Now we see God in humanity. We turn and flee from God when we fail to see him in humanity. This is why we wait during Advent to learn the truth of God that He is revealed in Immanuel, God with us.

            A very simple implication of this truth of God with us in Immanuel is that “we must love one another or die.”