The Annunciation as Awakening

Every Advent I read W. H Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. Every year different parts of the lengthy poem catch my attention. Today I want to start by talking about the part of the poem that describes the Annunciation, which is the appearance of the angel Gabriel to Mary.  

In the Gospel of Luke the opening words of Gabriel are “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” Auden sheds a different light on Gabriel’s message. In his poem the first word out of Gabriel’s mouth is not “Hail” or “Greetings” but “Wake.” Wake up! Awake! 

In one sense Mary’s dream of a happy engagement and big wedding and living happily ever after will be disrupted by the announcement of the angel Gabriel that is going to change everything. As I read the poem I cannot help but think that there is another layer to this story. A spiritual layer. That when the messenger of God says, “Wake!” he is speaking of waking from the dream of life. 

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Transcript

Every Advent I read W. H Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. Every year different parts of the lengthy poem catch my attention. Today I want to start by talking about the part of the poem that describes the Annunciation, which is the appearance of the angel Gabriel to Mary.  Auden paints the annunciation in a new light. 

In the Gospel of Luke the opening words of Gabriel are “Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” Or in a modern translation, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” The rest of the message of the angel in the Bible can be summed up as, “Guess what? You are going to have a baby, and he is the Son of God!” 

Auden sheds a different light on Gabriel’s message. In his poem the first word out of Gabriel’s mouth is not “Hail” or “Greetings” but “Wake.” Wake up! Awake! Auden continues this theme of Mary being asleep with his next words:

“Mary, in a dream of love

Playing as all children play,

For unsuspecting children may

Express in comic make-believe

The wish that later they will know

Is tragic and impossible;

Hear, child, what I am sent to tell:

Love wills your dream to happen, so

Love’s will on earth may be, through you,

No longer a pretend but true.

This has layers of meaning. On one level Mary is having the dream of human love. She is a teenage girl dreaming of a life of marriage with her fiancé Joseph. She is dreaming about a beautiful wedding and living happily ever after. Some say that the modern concept of romantic love did not exist in the first century, that it arose in the Middle Ages. But I think the Old Testament book The Song of Solomon shows there was the idea of marriage love. There is lots of love expressed in that Hebrew poem, and it is not just lust. 

There was definitely romantic love in the twentieth century when Auden wrote the poem. Auden had just gone through a painful romantic breakup of his own, so I think this is on his mind. He is imaging Mary as in a dream of love, which is going to come to an end. Mary is going to find out she is pregnant outside of marriage, which was a scandal back then. Joseph is going to want to divorce her. It is going to be a mess. So there goes her dream of a beautiful happy wedding. 

Auden is likely thinking of his own situation when he has Gabriel say that such a childish dream is “for unsuspecting children” “comic make-believe / The wish that later they will know is tragic and impossible.” Mary’s dream of a happy engagement and big wedding and living happily ever after will be disrupted by the announcement of the angel Gabriel that is going to change everything. 

As I read the poem I cannot help but think that there is another layer to this story. A spiritual layer. That when the messenger of God says, “Wake!” he is speaking of waking from the dream of life, which Auden calls a dream of love. I might be reading my own interpretation into Auden’s poem. But that is alright. Poems are written as much by the reader as the author. In any case this is a wonderful way to think of the teaching of this life as maya. This dream of human life is a dream of love – of God’s love. 

It is commonly said in nonduality that life is an illusion or maya or a dream that we are to awaken from. But life is not a bad dream. At times life can seem like a nightmare, but at other times it is a nice dream we do not want to awake from. It is a dream of love. I see human life as a dream that God is having, and we are characters in that dream. Because God is love, this dream life is in the final analysis a dream of love. This is what Christian nonduality has to contribute to the nondual conversation.

So in Christian nonduality this relative world is not seen as something negative – a life of suffering. We know that lots of bad things happen in life, but as Paul says, “all things work together for good for those who love God.” Life is still dualistic. It is a mixture of good and bad. This dream of life is a yin-yang balance of good and bad. But over all it is a dream that originates in Divine Love. This is the insight of Christian nonduality.

The messenger of God calls Mary to awake from the dream of life. In the poem the word “Wake” is spoken before Mary comes on stage. It is the very last word of one section, and Mary does not appear until the next section. But the very first word of the next section of the poem is “Mary.” “Mary, in a dream of love / Playing as all children play....”  So the word “Wake” is a transition between the two parts. It is a message from God to both Mary and us. 

That word changes the whole story of Advent from one of just remembering an event that took place in history two thousand years ago to something that happens now in our lives. We are called to wake up from the dream of life, which is the dream of God, a dream of love. As Auden says, “so Love’s will on earth may be, through you, No longer a pretend but true.” Of course the question is whether Auden’s interpretation of the Annunciation rings true with the biblical account. 

The story of the Annunciation in the gospel is about Gabriel telling the young woman Mary, who was barely more than a child, probably thirteen or fourteen years old or so, that she was going to have a child. “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name Jesus.  He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest....” A few verses later the angel says, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God.”

So the Annunciation is about a woman being told that she has God within her. It echoes the words of Jesus saying, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” The rest of the story of the pregnancy of Mary and the birth of Christ nine months later is about the process of coming to grips with that reality. Of course Christians take this story literally as about the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. And it certainly is that on one level, but it is also a metaphor for spiritual awakening.

We all have Christ within us. Christ is the true Self. Our only real self. This psyche that we identify with is just a shell covering the True Self, which is Christ. He is the Reality, and our physical lives and personalities are just a dream. Life is the dream of God, a dream of Love, but still just a dream. The point of the story is how the eternal Christ is born in our lives, through our lives. It is how we wake up to this truth and how in the process we give birth to Christ so that we are able to say with the apostle, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” 

The Annunciation tells us that this birthing is a process. It is not just a one-time event. There is a big difference between conception and birth. The Annunciation is the conception. In our spiritual lives the conception happens that moment we first get a taste of Nondual Reality. For me it was when I was 23 and I had a mystical experience of the Holy. It changed the course of my life from being a newly converted evangelical Christian to knowing there was something more to the spiritual life than what evangelicals were telling me.

We all have some type of experience like that. Perhaps for other evangelicals like I was, it is seeing through the rhetoric of evangelicalism. Seeing that there is something more than believing the right doctrines and being part of the right church and having the right worldview. Seeing that there is something more than conversion and faith and having a personal relationship with Jesus. Something more than a literal interpretation of the Bible as taught by those who say the Bible is inerrant and infallible. 

For those not coming from evangelical Christianity, the seed of the Kingdom of Christ may planted through some other spiritual experience. Like what Mary had. The Annunciation was a spiritual experience. It may come in the form of an experience of the Divine in Nature. Or perhaps in some other religious tradition. It may come through art or music. The conception of the Universal Christ within us can have many forms. 

But there is always the intuitive sense that we are more than we think we are. We are more than society says we are or that the church says we are. There is the awareness that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, as Jesus taught. That the Holy One is within us. Then it is just a matter of bringing that realization to fulfillment in full awakening. That is the spiritual teaching of the Annunciation.