This diary is adapted from an
entry on my own blog and was inspired, at least in part, by kid oakland's
Christmas message diary. Some of its content made a début in my comments there.
It's a musing on a set of antiphons. For those of you who aren't musicians or liturgists, an antiphon (in the sense that I'm using the word, anyway) is "A short piece of plain-song introduced before a psalm or canticle, to the Tone of which it corresponds, while the words are selected so as specially to illustrate and enforce the evangelical or prophetic meaning of the text." (Grove's Dictionary, as quoted in the OED)
Specifically, it's a musing on the set of seven antiphons known collectively as the "'O' antiphons," which are used in the Catholic tradition for the Liturgy of the Hours on the seven days preceding the Feast of the Nativity (Christmas)--17-24 December. In order, the antiphons are:
- O Sapientia (O Wisdom)
- O Adonai (O Lord)
- O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse)
- O Clavis David (O Key of David)
- O Oriens (O Rising One)
- O Rex gentium (O King of the Nations)
- O Emmanuel (O God-With-Us)
(Here's a neat bit of trivia. If you take the initial letters (not the "O," of course) of each antiphon, beginning with the last ("Emmanuel") and working backward to the first ("Sapientia"), they spell out the Latin phrase ero cras, "I will be [there] tomorrow.")
There is a "reason for the season," and I do happen to think that he gets left out of it far too often. But that's the sum total of the extent to which I would agree with the fundagelical set who are currently making such a big stink about the need to put Christ back into Christmas. I would argue, rather, with my blogging buddy kid oakland that they should first of all put Christ back into their brand of so-called Christianity. It's the old business about motes and beams. The right-wingnut Christians are so busy castigating those of us who are not threatened by the fact that there are people who believe differently that they completely fail to notice the fact that the Christ they want to inject "back" into the feast of Christmas is utterly absent from their own faith lives.
For example, here is the Gospel passage I have chosen to have read out at my funeral Mass, when the day comes:
Whenever the Son of Man may come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory. All the people of the world shall be gathered together before him, and he shall separate them one from another, just as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and he will place the sheep at his right hand, and the goats at his left.
Then shall the Ruler say to those on his right, "Come, you who are blessed of my Father, receive the realm which was prepared for you from the foundation of the universe. For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you welcomed me, naked, and you clothed me; I was ill and you watched over me; I was in prison and you came to me."
Then the just will answer him and say, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you to drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison and come to you?"
And the Ruler will answer and say to them, "Verily I say to you, as often as you did one of these things for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it for me."
(Matthew 25:31-40, my translation from the Greek)
I chose that passage, and cut it where I did, for a very specific reason. I want the people who hear it read out over my casket to take it to heart as their commission: Go, and do likewise.
But does that sound anything like what you hear from such notable and allegedly upstanding "Christians" (I use the scare-quotes advisedly) as Messrs. Falwell, Robertson, Colson, Dobson, Kennedy, et aliae? It surely doesn't to me. The words of that allegedly reverend set of men resonate much more closely with the angry prophets (and the angry God those prophets revealed) of the Hebrew Scriptures than they do with the gentle Jesus of the Gospels. They can fulminate with the best of men, but when it comes to the human, healing touch, they are woefully inadequate.
And that inadequacy is the most telling failure, the most damning witness against them, that I or anyone else can lay at their doors. As we read in Jesus' farewell discourse to his disciples in John's Gospel:
Amen, Amen I say to you, anyone who believes in the works I do will do those works themselves, and greater than those works, for I am going to the Father.
(John 14:12, my translation)
And there's always the perennial favorite of the gay Christian:
By their fruits you shall know them.
(Matthew 7:20, my translation)
I'm a practicing Catholic and while I definitely wish my Christian friends a Merry Christmas at this time of the year, my default greeting is nevertheless "Happy Holidays." Christians are not the only ones celebrating a holiday this season, and neither I nor my faith is threatened in the slightest way by that fact. It's not my intent to restrict my well-wishes to my fellow Christians, so I purposefully broaden my greeting to the widest possible extent. That is not a denigration of my faith so much as an affirmation of it.
Perhaps it is because my faith has been deeply influenced by the mystical tradition which sees, with the Buddhists, that reality is oneness, not separation. It is separation which is the illusion. Again as the Buddhists say, there is but one mountain even though there are many paths that lead to its peak. I am not threatened by the fact that there are other people in the world who believe and who practice differently from me. I revel in that fact. I celebrate it, just as the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council celebrated it:
Religions, however, that are bound up with an advanced culture have struggled to answer the same questions by means of more refined concepts and a more developed language. ...The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all people.
Nostra ætate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, 28 October, 1965; no. 2)
I'm pretty sure that it was in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, though I don't seem to have the citation (or the exact quote) to hand, that Merton said the saddest thing about the Cold War was that neither the Soviets nor the Western nations were ever going to be able to realize that they needed each other. Each had a unique piece of the puzzle that is the Truth, but neither one was willing to admit the other had anything to do with that puzzle, or to share their piece with the other--and so both were diminished, and the world along with it. I believe the same is true of those Christians (or Muslims, or Jews, or Hindus, or Buddhists... you get my point) who cannot yet, in the words of a Jewish midrash, look at another person from afar and see in him or her a brother or a sister. Because, as that midrash continues, "then the night that was in your soul disappears and both your heart and theirs are filled with light."
Today is a day of fasting and prayer for peace in the Middle East, as called by His Beatitude Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and his brother bishops in the Holy Land and in Africa. A number of other churches have joined in the call. I myself have been keeping a fast for that purpose on most Fridays since the outbreak of the second intifada, and while I join in today's observance, my own prayer today is that the Prince of Peace may come again to a world that is ready to receive him: a world that is at peace terra marique, "over all the lands and seas," as the Romans used to say.
There will be a light burning in my heart for that purpose, and in my window on Christmas Eve as a sign to the Holy Family on its wanderings that they are welcome in my humble abode. But so would be the Buddha were he to knock, or Muhammad (upon whom be peace), God's prophet, or the prophet Elijah, blessed be he. Because when you get right down to it, the name by which one calls the Divine is really the least important thing about it. I'm with John Donne:
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.
(Devotions on Emergent Occasions, xvii)
That last clause leaves me with goose-bumps every time. That's a library where I definitely want visiting privileges!