The Immortal and Nameless Centre

Every Advent I read W. H. Auden’s poem “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.” My practice of reading this work at Christmastime began about forty years ago when a friend lent me her old hardback copy. That first year I found the poem difficult to understand, but in time I grew to love it. Now Christmas would not be the same without it. Some people watch It’s a Wonderful Life, The Sound of Music or Elf every Christmas. I read For the Time Being.

The poem was written during the Second World War and is long: 1,500 lines and over 50 pages.  It was designed to be set to music, but as far as I know the music was never completed. The poem consists of a series of monologues that are spoken by characters, choruses, and a narrator. Each year a different part of the poem catches my attention. This year it was Part V in the section entitled “Advent.”

O where is that immortal and nameless Centre from which our points of

Definition and death are all equi-distant? Where

The well of our wish to wander, the everlasting fountain

Of the waters of joy that our sorrow uses for tears?

O where is the garden of Being that is only known in Existence

As the command to be never there, the sentence by which

Alephs of throbbing fact have been banished into position,

The clock that dismisses the moment into the turbine of time? 

The first line hooked me: “O where is that immortal and nameless Centre from which our points of definition and death are all equidistant?” That is exactly how I experience God. God is the Center of existence. Christmas may be the time for most Christians to swoon over the divine Baby in a manger, but I contemplate the immortal and nameless Center.

This Center is nameless because the true God cannot be named. That is the testimony of scripture. When Moses asked God’s name at the Burning Bush, God evaded the question. When pressed, God simply responded, “I am that I am.” A decade ago I translated the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching into Christian language for my book, The Tao of Christ, and I put it this way:

The God who can be described

is not the true God.

The Name that can be spoken

is not the Name of God. 

God is unnamable.

Naming God is the beginning of religion.

Let go, and you find God.

Hold on, and you get theology.

God is the immortal and unnamable Center “from which our points of definition and death are all equidistant.” I hear Auden saying that we spend most of our lives on the circumference of life, tinkering with the details. Everything that distinguishes us from everyone and everything else is on the edge of existence. True Life is at the Center, in “the Garden of Being” where all comes together in One. If you want to know God, look in the Center.

In traditional Nativity scenes, the Christ Child is the center of attention. All eyes are directed toward the manger. The other characters in the Christmas story – parents, animals, shepherds, magi and angels - occupy ever-widening circles around this Child, like the nine spheres of heaven in Dante’s Paradiso. To locate Christ, you look to the center. To find God in our lives, we look to the Center, the Home of God.

“Where is that immortal and nameless Centre?” Auden asks. Jesus answered that question. “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” That is where we find Christ during this Christmas season. The apostle John’s Christmas poem (the prologue of his gospel) says, “The Word (the Eternal Christ) became flesh and dwelt among us.” Literally the Greek text says that the Word dwells IN us. Christ is the Center. Take time this Christmas to get off the periphery of life and see for yourself.