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Archives for December 2024

The Holy Family

December 30, 2024

While doing a bit of searching in connection with yesterday’s Feast of the Holy Family, I discovered this striking–and humorous–image by the early 14th century Sienese iconographer Simoni Martini. It shows the finding of 12-year-old Jesus in the temple after Mary and Joseph had been searching for him for three days. Anyone who has parented an adolescent will, I hope, find this depiction amusing:

Let me take this opportunity to invite you to join us for Solemn Vespers tomorrow, Tuesday, December 31 at 5:15 p.m. In addition to exquisite music by Josquin and Willaert, our Schola will reprise a motet I composed for last year’s celebration: Virga Iesse floruit. At the bottom of this post is a sneak preview of the first of Josquin’s antiphon settings for this solemnity. The text, O admirabile commercium, with a translation, is also given below.

Merry Christmastide to all!

–Prior Peter, OSB

 

O admirabile commercium!
Creator generis humani,
animatum corpus sumens,
de Virgine nasci dignatus est:
et procedens homo sine semine,
largitus est nobis suam Deitatem.

O wondrous exchange:
the creator of human-kind,
taking on a living body
was worthy to be born of a virgin,
and, coming forth as a human without seed,
has given us his deity in abundance.

The Nativity of the Lord 2024

December 24, 2024

Dearly beloved, today our Savior is born; let us rejoice! Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life. The fear of death has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness. (Pope St. Leo the Great)

“Et Incarnatus Est” is on hiatus during Twelve Days of Christmas but will return after Epiphany.  Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 12:1

December 20, 2024

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

This is an invitation to put one’s security entirely in God’s hands, renouncing past (the country of Ur, which they had already left), present (kindred: our accustomed place in the fabric of society) and future (father’s house: our hoped-for inheritance). This demonstrates that the ‘land that I will show you’ ultimately refers not to Canaan, but to our heavenly homeland, outside of the succession of time in the present age.

The Progress of Advent

December 17, 2024

In days long ago, before the invention of Twitter, when kings, governors, and others occupying the highest levels of authority wished to communicate with their subjects, they relied on the spoken word. Most often, messages from the palace or capital were delivered by heralds. Upon more solemn and serious occasions, however, the monarch would make his or her own “progress” through the cities, towns, and villages of the realm. These were graver occasions not merely because of the requirements of royal pomp. Certain pressing issues at a local level were reserved for the judgment of the sovereign himself. When the sovereign was just, this was good news for those who loved peace and justice. The arrival of the king, his “advent,” was an affair of great municipal fervor. Extending several miles from the destination town, the royal route would be richly decorated. At various stations along the way, singers and dancers awaited the royal progress and celebrated the king’s or queen’s approach. When the sovereign finally arrived, the celebrations began in earnest. Then, of course, the work began, courts were drawn up, cases were heard, and judgments were dispensed. The sovereign then began the journey to the next town.

Before the institution of a hereditary  monarchy in ancient Israel, the king was God Himself. God communicated through heralds, who occupied the social positions of prophet or judge (priests, too, occasionally divined God’s will by use of the mysterious urim and thummim). God’s most memorable advent was His descent into Egypt to take Israel out from slavery and to pass judgement on Pharaoh and his army. As time went on,  such miraculous manifestations of God’s judgment became harder to discern. The great crisis was the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 586 B.C. and the deportation of the most important Judahites to exile in Babylon.  In spite of the high-flown and inspired rhetoric of Second Isaiah (chapters 40-55 of the book of that bears his name), the restoration of Jerusalem under the benevolent sponsorship of the Persian empire never quite took hold of the people’s imagination as had the Exodus. No wonder: many Jews opted to remain in Babylon and in Egypt, where life was decidedly less rugged than in the hills of Judea.

Most of the literary prophets of the Hebrew Bible grapple with this problem. The general solution proposed is that God will, at some future time, once again make His royal progress from His heavenly throne, and through an appointed Messiah, execute judgment on the idolatrous nations that successively dominated God’s chosen people. This “day of the Lord” was often enough a frightful event, but the goal was always the eventual restoration of justice and shalom, the peace that is “ordered tranquility [Saint Augustine’s phrase],” the world as God had intended it to be.

In the Christian proclamation, when God did make His advent, it was in a most unexpected manner. His herald, the angel Gabriel, went not into the public square, not to the courts of Herod (much less those of the faraway emperor, now in Rome), but to the humble dwelling of the Virgin Mary. God was indeed to make His solemn entry into the world, but it would be in an obscure village as a vulnerable infant. He would go unrecognized by nearly everyone until, ironically enough, His return to the Father at the Ascension. In the Incarnation, the Son of God came not to issue final judgment, but to invite all to a new way of thinking about the world. No longer is it divided into antagonized interest groups and national factions (though Israel would always remain God’s first love). Salvation and shalom (“My peace I give you—not as the world gives…”) would be offered to all peoples by the humble carpenter of Nazareth to those who would take seriously His offer to repent and undergo a change of heart.

We now wait for the ultimate advent, what is often called the Parousia or Second Coming, but each year, we call to mind this first “royal progress” of the infant King, so as to be reminded of His offer of peace and joy. “No one ever spoke like this man [John 7: 46]!” May these Final Days assist us in our preparation to celebrate the approaching Kingdom of God!

 

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 12:7

December 13, 2024

“The Lord appeared to Abram.”

Why does the Lord appear to Abram and not Noah, when we are told that Noah also was just? We will discover that Abram goes beyond justice when he pleads for Sodom and Gomorrah, whereas Noah made no apparent effort to save others besides his family from the Flood. That is to say, in wrath, he remembered mercy [Hab. 3: 2]. Since he accurately conveyed this quality of God, he also was found worthy to be the source of blessings for all the families of the earth.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 12:6-9

December 10, 2024

“Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem…”

Jacob will later recapitulate the very movement of Abram: entering from the north, he will first abide at Shechem, then Bethel, and then Hebron. While the proximate approach is from the north, they are ultimately coming from ‘the East’, where God had originally planted the Garden. Abram/Abraham and Jacob are gradually being acclimated to the idea that the way to their true home passes through this promised land.  The location of Jerusalem and the Temple of God’s presence have not yet been revealed, except in an obscure manner in the Binding of Isaac.

Spiritually, this is an indication that our return to God, to the image and likeness that was ours before sin, requires us to go out from the things that keep us attached to the world. We must journey by stages toward a place that God will reveal only when we have perfected our faith. We cannot ‘go back’ to an Edenic existence, at least by a direct route. As in Dante’s Inferno, the only way back is by journeying through the land of unlikeness, learning to let go of every spiritual hindrance.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 11:32

December 6, 2024

“Terah died in Haran.”

Interestingly, Terah, Abraham’s father, begins this sojourn away from Ur toward Canaan. But like Moses and the generation of the Exodus, he is not permitted to enter into the Promised Land. We are told that Abraham “took…all their possessions which they had gathered, and the persons that they had gotten in Haran.” [12: 5-6] This happens so that nothing tainted by Ur will accompany Abraham. Terah was appointed to bring the family into this place of transition.  But there the things of Ur were forgotten, and new possessions were acquired.  This mystically represents the uprooting of vice and the acquisition of virtue before we can properly enter upon the vision of God in His dwelling place.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 11:31

December 3, 2024

“They went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans.”

The rabbis tell us that the name ‘Ur’ (‘ur) is related to the word for ‘light’. Abraham was ‘tried in the fire’ of the Chaldeans, just as his later descendants, the Three Young Men spoken of in Daniel, were tried in the fires of idolatrous Babylon in the days of the Exile. Abraham, our ‘father in faith’, foreshadowed Israel’s return to the Holy Land. He, too, departed from the gods of Babylon/Chaldea to follow the promptings of the One God.

The way of faith is a way of darkness.  To go forth from Ur is to go forth from the light of the earthly senses into the darkness of the purgative way.  Abraham now ‘walks by faith and not by sight’ [2 Cor 5: 7], journeying ‘by paths they never knew’ [Is. 42: 16], allowing God to ‘turn the darkness before them into light.’

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