Blog Post

Black Friday at EDI

The Joy of Poetry (and Sales Resistance) - W. H. Auden's For the Time Being

Feast of St James the Great Martyr of Persia
Anno Domini 2019, November 27

ON FRIDAY 29 November 2019 - this year’s “Black Friday” - you are invited to an act of delayed gratification; a sit-in of slow media; an extended moment of patient, delectable resistance to the frenzied consumerism that secular society indulges in to inaugurate the Christmas season.

Come to The Ladder at 7:30 pm and enjoy a collaborative reading of W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. It may take awhile, but you can drop in and/or depart when you like. After all, by the time Black Friday rolls around, Advent has long since started, and Christians have been waiting for their Lord's arrival with eager patience for over two weeks.

Auden’s For the Time Being (written in 1941-1942) reframes the Gospel accounts of Matthew and Luke with extra dialogue from biblical characters and pointed reflections about how we in modern society deflect holy-days for our own purposes, whether political, economic, or otherwise. What better way to feel “the joy of sales resistance” (Wendell Berry) and to properly await our coming Messiah than to engage in that most outdated yet pleasing and humane act: poetry. After all, as Auden's Third Shepherd puts it, “What is real / About us all is that each of us is waiting.”

For those of you who don't live close enough to Wichita to join us, consider organizing your own sit-in of slow media.

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