"You must die before you die. There is no chance after." -C. S. Lewis,
Till We Have Faces
Advent is a season with apocalyptic overtones. We say that we are readying ourselves for Christ's birth, but he has already been born. We are really readying ourselves for the
celebration of his birth.
But underlying even that reality is a deeper reality: we are readying ourselves for his coming, a real coming - not the first one, but the second. In preparing ourselves for his first coming, which has already happened, we prepare ourselves for his next coming, which is yet to be.
And what does that preparation look like? In a word: repentance.
In many and better words, like this:
At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
I'm going to explicate the poem (which is one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets) a little, because it repays examination.
The start of the sonnet is impressive, drawing in all of creation - commanding the angels to begin the trumpet-sound of the apocalypse, commanding even the dead to rise again - all the dead, every person slain by mischance, by sickness, by malice, even by old age - to return to the scattered dust of their bodies and - note how Donne implies but does not actually
state - to stand in front of their one Judge.
The whole first eight lines of the poem are one long sentence, gathering all the created universe together in a breath and commanding it to commence the End of All Things. It's a grand, masterful, majestic summoning.
But then, there, at the ninth line, the whole motion of the sonnet abruptly halts, turns, does an about-face, and Donne's tone becomes low, humble, and penitent, begging God to stop the great event that Donne's own words just urged, and Donne says, "But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space".
His eyes turn, suddenly, from the vastness of the universe to the microcosm of his own soul, and what he finds there utterly dismays them. "For, if above all these" - that is, all those other persons he just summoned - "my sins abound" (this is an echo, of course, of St. Paul's admonition that we think of ourselves as the "chief among sinners") "tis late to ask abundance of thy grace, when we are there" - that is, when we do, indeed, stand naked before the judgment seat of Christ.
And what is Donne's remedy for the horrific place he finds himself, riddled with sin and in danger of imminent Judgment? It is this: "Teach me to repent".
Well, as far as it goes, but then there is the shocking turn of the last couple of the poem (remember, "good" did use to rhyme with "blood"): "Teach me to repent; for that's as good/As if thou hadst sealed my pardon, with thy blood."
Donne seems to say that repentance is as good as grace - as good a remedy against condemnation as the spilled blood of Jesus himself! As I said: it's a shocking assertion.
Except, of course, this is John Donne, a man quite possibly as devout as he was clever, and that is saying a good deal.
If you look again, you can see what he is saying - what he is trying to convey with that apparently heretical last couplet: he is saying that grace enables repentance. It all turns on the "as if" in that last sentence. "
As if thou hadst sealed my pardon with thy blood." The sentence is falsely hypothetical. Donne knew very well that Christ
had sealed his pardon with his blood, and so that "as if" becomes a "because", and the meaning of the last couplet becomes clear: Donne is saying that his repentance will be good because Christ
has sealed his pardon with his blood; it is that sacrifice which makes true repentance possible, it makes it possible for repentance to become not just fruitless despair at his sin, but a godly sorrow that leads to a real change of heart, that will help him become a new man, a change that makes him not just safe, but also
sound.
Now with all that said, here's the poem again. Read it aloud, because spoken rhythm always aids meaning in good poetry:
At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
More Advent thoughts can be found here, over at
A Ten'O'Clock Scholar.
Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell
