Monastery of the Holy Cross

Archives for January 2018

After Epiphany

Guests frequently ask us why we leave our Christmas tree up until February. This isn’t mere sentimentalism on our part, but is rooted in the nature of this time of the Church year, even in the “ordinary form” of the Mass.

Traditionally, the time between Epiphany and Lent is marked by a gradual transition. This is clearer if one is celebrating the extraordinary form with the old calendar. This Sunday will be the Second Sunday after Epiphany rather than the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time. However, the new calendar and the ordinary form of the Mass still conform in important ways to the old rite. This week, the collect at Mass (the opening prayer) is the same as that in the old rite, and the collect, prayers, and chant propers for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time are the same as for the Second Sunday after Epiphany. This correspondence continues for several weeks. So even though we are in Ordinary Time, the prayers and chants continue to emphasize the mystery of Epiphany, the appearance of God made visible in our human flesh.

This is not as clear if you don’t sing the traditional chants! But we do.

There are two primary hinges that move us away from Epiphany toward Lent. The first no longer appears in the calendar, and that is the Sunday called “Septuagesima.” This is roughly 70 days before the Easter Octave, and in the extraordinary form, one wears begins to wear violet vestments and stops singing Alleluia, as if Lent had already begun. This Sunday is movable, and this year falls on January 28. We don’t follow the old calendar, but we still mark this date with a higher level of asceticism in the cloister and darker chants at Mass.

The second hinge is the Feast of the Presentation. This is traditional a ‘joyful’ mystery in the prayer of the rosary, and it is especially known for the blessing of the candles to be used at the liturgy throughout the year. But it also has echoes of a ‘sorrowful’ mystery. Christ is presented in the temple as a sacrifice. He is redeemed, ‘bought back’, at the price of two turtledoves, but the imagery is clear. This is the child destined to offer Himself for the salvation of the world, to be the new and true temple. This celebration falls forty days after Christmas, and is really the end of the season that follows Epiphany. Hence, we keep our tree up until the Presentation.

We hope to see many of you at 7:00 p.m. on the evening of February 2, when we will celebrate Solemn Vespers. It will be your last chance to see our tree for this year!

On the Mystical Antiphons

[The following is from the program notes for Solemn Vespers of Sunday, December 31.]

The coming of God in human flesh is the central event in human history. After the Word became flesh, all of creation appeared changed to those who encountered Jesus Christ risen and glorified. Christ’s sacred humanity became the key that reinterpreted all of the Scriptures and indeed unlocks the mystery of the human person and human destiny: to be divinized by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

The Incarnation has had a way of scandalizing those who feel that it is beneath God’s majesty to inhabit the ordinariness and weakness of the human state. Early ‘gnostic’ movements in the Church’s history invented a variety of ways of protecting God from His own rashness, it would seem. In this milieu, the Church discovered that the virgin birth by Mary, the Mother of God was a central guarantee of the mystery of the Incarnation. Christ took flesh from the Blessed Virgin while retaining His divinity, as shown by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.

As the Church re-read the sacred Scriptures of Israel to understand more profoundly the mystery of Christ, she also began to discover a multitude of allusions to the mystery of His conception and to the sanctity of His Mother. The antiphons (the short texts at the beginning and end of each Psalm) of today’s solemnity assist us in reinterpreting the Psalms according to their Christology and excavating for us hidden meanings of the Old Testament. The mysterious fleece of Gideon (see Judges, chapter six) was covered with heavenly dew while all the ground around it remained dry and barren. This descent of the dew portended the Lord’s triumph in battle and salvation for Israel. The bramble bush that drew the attention of Moses burned with heavenly flame but was not consumed. And from it, he heard God’s Word, the Son, according to the Fathers of the Church. Mary received the fullness of deity in her womb without losing her virginity, nor being consumed by God’s powerful presence. And the Word that was her only Son was to lead all peoples, not through the Red Sea, but through death itself.  He did this by taking our sins upon Himself, becoming the Lamb of God, attested to by John the Baptist.

The length and density of the traditional antiphons attached to today’s solemnity are unusual. Most antiphons quote or directly paraphrase Biblical texts. The theological content of these ‘mystical’ antiphons is surely related to Mary’s status as the ‘vanquisher of all heresies’, the guarantor, as explained above, of the orthodox interpretation of the Incarnation.

Even more unusual is Josquin’s decision to do a full setting of the antiphons of this one liturgical day. Aside from his numerous Mass settings, Josquin set almost no fully liturgical music (in contrast to the paraliturgical devotional works for which he is justly renowned). Musical settings of Mass Ordinaries (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, etc.) have the advantage of being usable on almost any day of the year, whereas the ‘proper’ antiphons for today’s solemnity can only be performed on this one day of the year—at least if one wishes to honor the traditional placement of liturgical texts.

In Josquin’s day, the Roman liturgy celebrated the Circumcision of Christ on January 1, but this was a relatively recent observance, especially at Rome. And even when the Circumcision was adopted in the universal Church, it retained the more ancient association with the motherhood of Mary. Surely part of Josquin’s decision to set these texts is motivated by his own well-attested Marian devotion and the growing popularity of such devotion (especially in the use of the rosary) in his day. Even so, it is striking that he chose to set the texts of this solemnity rather than other devotional poems, which were numerous in his day.

The richness of this evening’s liturgy admirably brings 2017  to a close and reminds us of the fecundity of the mystery of our Faith. May the New Year be blessed by the Lord, the Lord of history and King of the nations!

 

 

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