Advent III: Go Set a Watchman

go set a watchman. stand alone
on the tallest point of the tower.
make friends with the ice dagger kisses
of the wind on the back of your neck,
make love to the formless void 
in front of you that is your one duty. 

go set a watchman. forget 
the warm home lights behind you—
they are no longer yours. 
yours is the night cold and night terrors,
the endless expanse of nothingness 
to which you have been wedded.

go set a watchman. keep looking
for the faintest bleed of light to ease 
the terrible cold and inescapable blackness,
the sense that you have been duped 
into wasting your few precious days 
on this fool’s dream.

go set a watchman. steel yourself
to remember the promise you were told,
though the details fade like ancient ink.
it was something to do with morning,
reinforcements rushing through the gap,
waves upon waves upon waves,
great hordes of startling mercy.
in the pulverizing dark remember: 
it was something to do with morning.

go set a watchman. shake yourself
awake, slap yourself, do a jig 
upon the parapet if you must, only
stay awake, because one morning
as if from a great distance you will hear
your own voice crying out: at last! 

This one took so many drafts. I don’t know why, some poems are like that. I was reading Fleming Rutledge about Advent positioning us as watchmen (of course I’ll quote her in a minute), which reminded me of the title of Harper Lee’s notorious sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. I love the wording of “go set a watchman”—how active the phrasing is despite the passivity of watching.

Perhaps that’s unfair to watching. It’s not passive—done rightly, watching is, in fact, very strenuous, a constant straining and surveying, unceasing alertness and expectation, every muscle taught, poised to react. Still, it’s not the same as saying, go set a soldier. Go set a hunter. Go set a rebel a sniper a general a king. 

Go set a watchman, that’s Advent—this tension between action without reprieve and waiting with no apparent progress. But I should just let Fleming say it:  

“The church lives in Advent, the Time Between, The Time Being, as Auden calls it. We live in a dark place, no question about it; but all the faculties of the faithful are straining to the watchman, who stands on the heights with his face toward the dawn—one of the most wonderful of all biblical symbols. Watchman, tell of the night! In a very deep sense, the entire Christian life in this world is lived in Advent, between the first and second coming of the Lord, in the midst of the tension between things the way they are and things the way they ought to be….To be a Christian is to live every day of our lives in solidarity with those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, but to live in the unshakable hope of those expect the dawn.”

Another note: I realize that these Advent poems of mine may seem rather devoid of Jesus—you know, the reason for the season (to use some good old Christianese). But like I talked about with my first poem, that’s the point of Advent, to name the waiting and linger in it. Because, at least for me, that actually makes me appreciate Jesus more. 

It’s not only the idea of hope deferred being sweeter or the idea of juxtaposition—the deeper the darkness, the brighter the light and all that. It’s that I often feel that I can’t actually describe the beauty and wonder of Jesus coming and the hope of him coming again. How do you put words to what happened? Or, even harder, what will happen?How do you paint one eucatastrophe, let alone two? And so I guess my hope is that by defining what he saved us from, by saying what he is not, I will be able to see him in the negative space those statements create. It’s like how you don’t really see a black hole, you see what happens to the light around it, and that’s how you know it’s there. Except it’s not an emptiness I can’t describe but a fullness of being that is so beyond me that I’m stuck with rambles like this.

He is in the negative space. He is in every hole in every poem, in every inarticulate chasm behind all of our fumbling words. 

A quote to that point (I realize I’ve gotten off track from watchmen; I apologize) from the incredible solo play A Life. The narrator had asked his father-in-law where God is and later he recounts the answer he received:

He says to me one time—he looks at me and he says, he's in the feeling of water. Sometimes there's the shape of the roll of the land. He's in the way some people move. He's in the light falling over a city at the start of an evening. He's in the space between two numbers. 

I get chills every time I read those words.

So anyway, here’s to all our attempts to describe God and the way he shatters our boundaries and comes to us just when we feel we can wait no longer.

(Also, you can watch A Life, performed by the marvelous Andrew Scott, for free on YouTube. It’ll be some of the best forty minutes of your life.)

In Other Words…

goodreads (books)

Reached my 50 book goal!! Still catching up on reviews.

letterboxd (movies)

I was sick this week so I spent several days watching Schitt’s Creek and yes I cried at the end (and it wasn’t just because I was sick).

Happy more-than-halfway-through Advent, friends. The dawn is coming.

~ Aberdeen