Month: December 2012

A Thrill of Hope: Carols of Resistance

David Herbert4 Comments

Richard Beck refers to the two carols, It came upon the midnight clear  and O Holy Night as “resistance literature”. The subversive words tend to get buried under the sentimentality that is so often Christmas, but they spell out the redemptive good news of the Christmas gospel. Both were written in the late 1840’s. It came upon the midnight clear is based on a poem written by Edmund Sears in 1849. O Holy Night was composed by Adolphe Adam two years earlier than that.  This was at a time of great turbulence. The American Civil War was not far away, and slaves were on their way to emancipation. (The Emancipation Proclamation was in 1863). It is easy to get carried away by a good tune and miss the political and redemptive meaning of both these lovely carols, and the Christmas story.

So we sing from It came upon the midnight clear:

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
the world has suffered long;
beneath the angel-strain have rolled
two thousand years of wrong;
and man at war with man, hears not
the love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
and hear the angels sing.

In O Holy Night we sing:

Truly he taught us to love one another;
his law is love and his gospel is peace.
Chains shall he break for the slave is our bother;
and in his name shall all oppression shall cease.

Richard Beck points out that the theme of emancipation is even stronger in the original French poem, where those four lines are rendered:

The Redeemer has overcome every obstacle:
The Earth is free, and Heaven is open.
He sees a brother where there was only a slave,
Love unites those that iron has chained.

The theme of redemption is the essential Good News of Christmas. Hope and longing constitute the spirit of Christmas which promises a world turned upside down: where freedom is proclaimed to prisoners, the blind recover their sight, and the oppressed go free. It is such a subversive message that gets shrouded in sentimentality. We get carried away by a good tune. Do we know that they are redemption songs?

O come, Wisdom

David Herbert1 Comment

This is what wisdom looks like. It is not as we have come to know wisdom which so often comes dressed in cap and gown. Wisdom so often looks serious, powerful and distant. But here, wisdom looks personal, merciful, charitable and child-like. This icon of Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom is by Slovenian artist and theologian Marko Rupnek, and was commissioned by Pope Paul II. This is what wisdom looks like for those who feel betrayed by those who have impersonated Wisdom and for those whose only hope is in a Wisdom, the likes of which we have never seen before.

The prayer for Wisdom is the first of the Advent Antiphons. They are for those who live in lamentable times. There are seven of them, and they are part of Common Worship Daily Prayer for the seven days starting today.

The prayer goes:

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other mightily,
and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.

Malcolm Guite has composed an appeal for Wisdom as part of his reflections on the Advent Antiphons. This is part of his collection of Sonnets, Sounding the Seasons.

O Sapientia

I cannot think unless I have been thought,
Nor can I speak unless I have been spoken.
I cannot teach except as I am taught,
or break the bread except as I  am broken.
O mind behind the mind through which I seek,
O light within the light by which I see,
O Word beneath the words with which I speak,
O founding, unfound Wisdom, finding me,
O sounding Song whose depth is sounding me,
O Memory of time, reminding me,
My Ground of Being always grounding me,
My Maker’s Bounding Line, defining me,
Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring,
Come to me now, disguised as everything.

When we pray for Wisdom we recognise that we are still seeking her. We know Folly sure enough, but Wisdom is yet to be found. In Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth we are reminded just how elusive Wisdom is. There, the so-called Wise Men got their directions so wrong that they travelled to Jerusalem before realising their mistake. Worldly wise they expected the special birth to be at the seat of power, and not in a stable. As Brueggemann says, they were nine miles wide of the mark.

But we act as if we are “spot on”.

I am heartened by the attention being given to how we can share concerns about how we are failing (the Harvard Business Review has published its Failure Issue). We tend to protect ourselves by saying what a good job we are doing, and how we are meeting our targets, like Little Jack Horner sat in his corner. Too often we just list our successes to promote ourselves and our organisation. This is hiding the truth. This is foolish. Further questions need asking such as “in what ways are we (am I) failing to do what we feel we should be doing?” That question is far more likely to uncover the truth. Realising the lamentable truth of our lives is the start of our quest for Wisdom. Wisdom’s absence makes our hearts grow fonder for her.

Here is a link to a general post I wrote about the Advent Antiphons which you may like to read.

Ero Cras

David Herbert1 Comment

The Antiphons are one of the cool features of Advent prayer as Christians look forward to the coming of the Kingdom of God. There are seven Antiphons. They all begin with “O”, which is then followed by a title or attribute of Christ. There is one antiphon for each day of the week from December 17th. The Christian faith is spelled out in the initials of the Latin titles in the antiphons. Each title is drawn from Isaiah’s prophecy. Here’s the list (thank you wikipedia), together with reference to Isaiah:

  1. December 17th: O Sapientia (O Wisdom) – Isaiah 11:2f; 28:29
  2. December 18th: O Adonai (O Lord) – Isaiah 11:4-5; 33:22
  3. December 19th: O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse) – Isaiah 11:1 and 10
  4. December 20th: O Clavis David (O Key of David) – Isaiah 22:22, 9:7 and 42:7
  5. December 21st: O Oriens (O Dayspring) – Isaiah 9:2
  6. December 22nd: O Rex Gentium (O King of the nations) – Isaiah 9:6 ; 2:4
  7. December 23rd: O Emmanuel (O God who is with us) – Isaiah :14

The initials read backwards from the 7th to the 1st antiphon. They spell out ERO CRAS which means “Tomorrow, I will be there.”  This faith in tomorrow is borne out of the compassionate response to the realities of the present tense/tensions which are rightly seen as lamentable. Richard Beck, in an Advent meditation, describes Advent as  “sort of like a lament. Advent is being the slave in Egypt, sitting with the experience of exile. Advent is about looking for God and hoping for God in a situation where God’s promises are outstanding and yet to be fulfilled.” In a world where everything is “now”, we sometimes lose patience and sight of the fact that now was never intended to be the time, when our churches were to be full, when kingdom was to come in all its fullness. Now is a time of exile, a time of alienation, a time for not being at home in the world, a time of waiting for tomorrow, a time of lament, a time for hope.

Enya captures the spirit of waiting and the hope of tomorrow as she sings the 7th of the antiphons – part of the hymn O come, O come Emmanuel .which paraphrases the seven antiphons.

You may be interested to read about the long now.

Holding hands and climbing

David Herbert1 Comment

Exploring the habits of the heart crucial for sustaining a democracy Parker J Palmer, in Healing the Heart of Democracy, highlights this poem by Hafez, a 13th century Persian poet . The poem is called Out of a Great Need

Out
of a great need
we are holding hands
and climbing.
Not loving is a letting go.
Listen,
the terrain around here
is
far too
dangerous
for
that.