Two quotations on time for the twelfth day of Christmas

First, St. Augustine’s sermon 185:

Rise, you that sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ will enlighten you (Eph 5:14). For you, I repeat, God became man. You would have died for eternity, unless he had been born in time. You would never be set free from the flesh of sin, unless he had taken to himself the likeness of the flesh of sin (Rom 8:3). You would have been in the grip of everlasting misery, had it not been for the occurrence of this great mercy. You would not have come back to life, unless he had adjusted himself to your death. You would have faded away, if he had not come to the rescue. You would have perished, if he had not come.1

And second, a stanza from W.H. Auden’s glorious oratorio For the Time Being:

We who must die demand a miracle. How could the Eternal do a temporal act, The Infinite become a finite fact? Nothing can save us that is possible: We who must die demand a miracle.2

Stirring words to bear with us as we shift away from Christmas feasting and back into the usual rhythms.

  1. St. Augustine, Sermon 185, trans. Edmund Hill, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, vol. 3, ed. John E. Rotelle (New City Press, 1993), 21. ↩︎

  2. W. H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (Princeton University Press, 2013), 8. ↩︎