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A continuation of our look at the O Antiphons for these last few days before Christmas…
LATIN: O Rex gentium, et desideratus earum, lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum: veni, et salva hominem, quem de limo formasti.
ENGLISH: O King of the gentiles/nations and their desired One, the cornerstone that makes both one: come, and deliver man, whom you formed out of the mud.
Scripture Reference:
Revelation 15:3
Psalm 118:22
Isaiah 28:16
Matthew 21:42
Mark 12:10
Luke 20:17
Acts 4:11
Ephesians 2:20
I Peter 2:6
Relevant verse of Veni, Veni Emmanuel:
O come, Desire of nations, bind,
In one the hearts of all mankind;
Bid Thou our sad divisions cease,
And be Thyself our King of peace.
During Advent, the Voice of the Word, the greatest man born of woman, St. John the Baptist calls for us to prepare the way for the Lord who is coming. The Lord is coming by the straight path, whether we have straightened it or not.
The Baptist’s message has it its core his own mission statement: He must increase, I must decrease.
In life we experience many different forms of “straightening” and “decreasing”.
Chief among them is rejection, with the pain that comes with it.
The King who is coming sacramentally and liturgically at Bethlehem teaches us how to empty ourselves and how to endure the emptying which comes from the vicissitudes of our fallen state, our face to face and heart to heart meetings with cruelty, malice and indifference.
Allow me to riff on a word or two. Let’s take limus… mud.
In English when we “mud” something, we use a kind of cement. To “lime” something is to put a sticky covering on it. Ezekiel describes the walls that are limed with mud. The Jews in Egypt made bricks from mud and Nahum describes making bricks of mud to strengthen walls. The Lord used mud of saliva to heal a blind man. Of course we human beings were made by God from the mud, sometimes described as mud’s opposite, dust. Hebrew aw-fawr’ means, “clay, earth, mud:—ashes, dust, earth, ground, mortar, powder, rubbish.”
Limus is, ironically, something which falls apart like dust and which sticks things together like cement. Christ, when He comes as Liberator, will free everyone to do as he pleases. Some will be blown like dust in their self-liberation. Others will freely stick to Christ like cement, and in Him be truly free.
Christ is the connector.
He is the cornerstone in the antiphon, which is an allusion to the cornerstone that was rejected. In Acts 4 Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, preached about the stone that builders rejected. Peter repeated what he heard Christ quote, Ps 118, one of the great Hallel psalms, about the stone rejected by the builders winding up being the corner stone. Ps 118 is one of the six Psalms which were recited at Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, on Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, and on the eight days of Hanukkah. Peter uses the image again in 1 Peter 2. Everyone would have recognized the reference. But Peter goes on saying: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
In Ephesians 2:20 Paul has Christ as akrogoniaios – keystone, cornerstone. A cornerstone describes also a keystone, the sort of stone that caps an arch and, by its presence, holds the other stones in their proper places. A corner stone connects and holds together two walls. Christ holds together Jews and Gentiles, that is “everyone”. Holy Church, built on a Rock, is like a temple of living stones, limed and anointed with Christ, our mud mudded by and mortared to Christ. Those who are mud limus are cemented down in Him and we are truly free to be who we are. Those who chose the dust limus are blown away, atomized on the wind, never to with anything or anyone.
In calling Christ the King of the nations, gentiles, we have a reference to the Passion and to the Second Coming. As old Simon saw the Light of the Gentiles in the Infant Christ, we shall see the Light of the Son in glory in the Second Coming. Also, remember that when Christ was wroth that people had taken over a section of the Temple for commerce, etc., His anger stemmed from the fact that they had taken the Courtyard of the Gentiles. But the coming of the gentiles to find the Messiah was one of the signs that Christ’s mission was ready for its fulfillment in the Passion. When the Jews and gentiles joined in this way, “the day” was at hand when He would set us free from our sins.
Shall we hear the monks of Le Barroux? This was recordedin 2018, when 22 Dec fell on a Sunday. Hence, because they are incensing the altar during the Magnificat, etc., which takes a while they repeat the antiphon. Not a problem, of course!
This one made me work! There’s an attractive “tactic” at the beginning.
NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.
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Today is 21 December, the Winter Solstice and the Feast of the Old Testament Prophet St. Micah.
Since the beginning of December, Holy Mother Church has been imitating the Lord on the Road to Emmaus.
She has been reminding us of all the prophecies about the coming of the Messiah who would also be incarnate God.
She has done this subtly, through feast days, but feasts that are not generally visible to most of us. Holy Mother Church has used her “album of the saints”, the Roman Martyrology, to teach about the Old Testament Prophets.
Sometimes you hear people – even priests, for shame – use the word “liturgy” when they mean “Mass”. “In today’s ‘liturgy’…”, they say.
No. The Mass is the greatest expression of the Church’s liturgy, but it is not all there is. There are also the canonical hours of the divine Office. The Office also makes use of the liturgical book called the Roman Martyrology.
Paging through the 2005 Martyrology, we find that many Old Testament figures are counted as saints.
If the general calendar of the Church permits, it would even be possible to celebrate them for Mass!
Today, for example, is the Winter Solstice AND the Feast of St. Micah. Micah said (5:2)
But you, O Bethlehem Eph?rathah, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.
About those Old Testament prophets…
Keep in mind that in earlier days, Advent was longer than it is now, from Martinmas. Prophets start popping up in the calendar in the 2005 Martyrology.
19 Nov – Abdia or Obediah. (RomMart 2005, p. 632)
1 Dec – Nahum (p. 652)
2 Dec – Habakkuk (p. 654)
3 Dec – Sophonius or Zephaniah (p. 655)
16 Dec – Haggai (p. 674) and some sources David (others have David on 29 Dec)
18 Dec – Malachi (p. 677)
21 Dec – Micah (p. 680)
24 Dec – “Commemoratio omnium sanctorum avorum Iesu Christi, filii, David, filii Abraham, filii Adam…” (p. 684) Commemoration of all the holy “ancestors” (lit. grandfathers) of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham, son of Adam
Just a little public service announcement.
FYI… other prophets
1 May – Jeremiah (p. 263)
9 May – Isaiah (p. 277)
15 June – Amos (p. 338)
20 July – Elijah (p. 401)
21 July – Daniel (1878 MartRom)
23 July – Ezekiel (p. 408)
4 Sept – Moses (1878 MartRom)
6 Sept – Zachariah (1878 MartRom)
21 Sept – Jonah (p. 528)
17 Oct – Hosea (p. 575)
19 Oct – Joel (p. 579)
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This year’s Winter Solstice is marked in special ways.
First, this is the day when, at last, the days in the Northern Hemisphere began to lengthen. I don’t know about you, but these short days are hard on my.
Second, this year we are to have a celestial event that hasn’t been seen for 800 years. At sunset look to the southwest to see an amazing conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. Saturn will seem as close to Jupiter as some of its moons. Those of you with telescopes will see rings and Jupiter’s moon in the same field of view. You won’t be around for the next time, so have a look.
Third, because the main door of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the main altar within are exactly aligned with the rising of the sun on the Vernal Equinox, the sun shines up the nave. Also, on the Winter Solstice, the Egyptian obelisk relocated to the center of St. Peter’s Square lines up with the rising Sun on the Winter Solstice. It lines up with the obelisk at Piazza del Popolo on the Summer Solstice. Popes such as Sixtus V placed these obelisks precisely according to a urban renovation plan. The obelisk at St. Peter’s serves as the gnomon of an enormous sundial. It was also blessed to be a barrier to demons, which is why the base is inscribed with a text from the rite of exorcism.
The great churches of Christendom served also as accurate clocks and sometimes you see on the interior pavement an analemma where a shaft of sunlight darts to the floor. There is a great example of this in Rome at Santa Maria degli Angeli.
Moreover, for a couple of years there was generated a societal panic because of COVID (aka the Wuhan Devil). I think the virus was cursed once it got out. That’s one reason why we see the growing demonic crazy these days and certain hell-fueled forces are revealing their long-planned schemes for global population control and reduction. Even in the Church the Devil is cooking, cooking openly cooking.
Pray to God for a miracle: the sudden, complete, and lasting extirpation of COVID, its variants, and an end to the tragic side-effects that seem to be caused by the “jab”.
God in His Wisdom, provided within the framework of the cosmos object lessons by which we might come to grasp something of His good plan for our salvation.
Since the very earliest times, Christians observed the turning of the seasons and the changing direction of the sun’s apparent risings and settings.
For example, through history we Christians have made much of St. Lucy’s Day in December (Latin for light is lux), and we have in the traditional calendar the Ember Days – and this is the Advent Ember week – which tie us in the Northern Hemisphere closer to the seasons, we celebrate St. John the Baptist in the summer at the solstice.
Remember how John said: He must increase, I must decrease. That’s what happens to days at his feast day: the Light who is Christ increases.
Moreover, we have entered into the heavier days of Advent, Advent II, as it were. We are singing the O Antiphons at Vespers, which have their delightful Latin acrostic. Today… appropriately…
LATIN: O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol iustitiae: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis.
ENGLISH: O dawn of the east, brightness of light eternal, and sun of justice: come, and enlighten those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.
Scripture Reference:
Luke 1:78, 79
Malachi 4:2
Relevant verse of Veni, Veni Emmanuel:
O come, Thou Dayspring, come and cheer,
Our spirits by Thine advent here;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.
We are all desperately in need of a Savior, a Redeemer who is capable of ransoming from the darkness of our sins and from the blinding and numbing wound of ignorance from which we all suffer. In their terrible Fall, our First Parents inflicted grave wounds in the souls of every person who would live after them, except of course – by an act of singular grace – the Mother of God. Our wills are damaged. Our intellect is clouded. In Christ we have the Truth, the sure foundation of what is lasting. All else, apart from Him fails and fades into dark obscurity. He brings clarity and light back to our souls when we are baptized or when we return to Him through the sacrament of penance.
At Holy Mass of the ancient Church, Christians would face “East”, at least symbolically, so that they could greet the Coming of the Savior, both in the consecration of the bread and wine and in the expectation of the glorious return of the King of Glory. They turned to the rising sun who is Justice Itself, whose light will lay bare the truth of our every word, thought and deed in the Final Day.
Let us turn to the LIGHT, repent our evil ways and habits, and grasp onto Christ in His Holy Church, for as we read in Scripture:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in God.”
Here is something that I wrote a while back. Since today in the Vetus Ordo calendar is the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, I figured that it might be good to share for those who haven’t seen it.
[…]
Christ showed [the Apostles in the locked room] His hands and feet and side, to demonstrate that He had a real body and that it was also is His Body. He didn’t pick up some unwounded, perfect Body that He was now inhabiting. We are our bodies, as we are our rites. The fact that the wounds remained in His Body’s hands, feet and side provided continuity with His Body before and during His Passion. He isn’t a mere shade of the Lord. Nor has he exchanged Himself for an unwounded version. In this way Christ began to show them the traits of the risen Body, traits which we, too, will share in the Resurrection: clarity (reflecting God’s glory), impassibility (incapable of suffering), agility (ease and speed of movement), subtlety (unhindered by barriers).
[…]
We don’t know why Thomas wasn’t with the other ten Apostles in the room for that first appearance of the Lord. I like to imagine that it was his turn to get the “take out” for the rest of them.
Thomas, who had doubted, put his trust in the Lord at this point. In fact, he literally handed his trust to Him where the point of the lance had left its mark on the Lord’s glorious Risen Body, a wound from a Roman lance large enough to insert his hand. The Lord told Thomas to “thrust” (Greek bále) his hand “eis ten pleurán… into (His) side”. If we want to be picky, we might note that the Greek word “cheír”, insofar as our anatomy is concerned, can mean “hand”, but it can also mean “finger” or “hand and arm”, the later so much so that in some contexts additional words are added to denote “hand” as distinct from the arm (cf. Liddell-Scott-Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon aka LSJ – “???? , ?”).
This is significant for depictions in art, as in the famous painting by Caravaggio, wherein Thomas puts his finger into Christ’s side and peers into it, which smacks of the spirituality of St. Bonaventure who wrote about how Thomas the Apostle looked through the Lord’s visible wounds and saw His invisible wound of love. It also affects depictions of the crucifixion of the Lord and of His risen Body, with the holes of the nails in the hands. Some maintain that Christ would have been crucified with nails through the wrists so that the ulna and radius bones would sustain His Body’s weight rather than tearing through the flesh of His hands.
Christ tells Thomas to explore with his finger (dáktylos) the spike holes of His “hands/wrists”, which would be more or less the size of a large finger. However, he tells Thomas to use his hand for the wound in His side. The Greek suggests to me that the Lord instructed Thomas to push, thrust His hand into the wound channel left by the Roman lance, which had gone so far as to lacerate the Lord’s Sacred Heart.
We don’t have in the Gospel account of this stunning moment, to which John was eyewitness, a precise statement by John that Thomas physically did it. All it says is that Thomas responded, “My Lord and my God!” Christ responded with a “beatitude” (v. 29): “Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
Was Thomas so overwhelmed that He could not touch the Lord in that way? All He could utter was that amazing witness to belief in the divinity of Christ? The clearest and most exultant of any in the Gospels?
Christ refers to Thomas seeing Him, but He did not say, “because you have touched me”. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if the Risen Christ tells you to do something, you do it. Furthermore, John immediately concludes this chapter with something so definitive that it feels like the end of the whole work (vv. 30-31):
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.
There follows chapter 21 and the account of the reconciliation of Peter at the Sea of Galilee. We moderns count that as chapter 21. Remember, the Gospels were not written with chapters and verses and not even word breaks. Those were imposed centuries later. Yet, one has the sense that what happened between Christ and Thomas was so amazing that John penned something like a conclusion to his Gospel after Thomas’s cry of faith, arguably the climax of John’s account.
Given the various meanings of “hand” in Greek, and that word “thrust”, and the fact that the wound from the lance remained, therefore remained all the way to His Heart, perhaps Our Lord required Thomas not merely to touch His side but even to feel the breath, the ruach, in His torn lung. Did Thomas, while feeling the ruach on his wrist, touch with his hand the physical, risen, subtle, impassible, agile, blazing bright Heart of Jesus?
By the way, in art, statues and painting, the Apostles are usually depicted with the instruments of their martyrdom. St. Thomas is often depicted with a lance.
On this Sunday we emphasize the mercy of God and the institution of the Sacrament of Penance, perhaps the greatest encounter we have with incarnate Mercy, Holy Communion notwithstanding.
Christ told Thomas to do what He did before witnesses so that they too would understand about the traits of His risen Body and that it was truly His own. Knowing full well that we would one day read this, He inspired the disciple He most loved to write his Gospel account, an account that connects Thomas to the inspiration of the Spirit and the mercy of Christ’s Heart in a way that other Apostles didn’t experience on that first Easter evening appearance.
When we go to confession, we enter into Mercy in order to be breathed upon by the Spirit and to feel the beating, living, healing, Heart of Love.
We continue our look at the O Antiphons with today’s O Clavis David
Again we hear the theme of Christ as the Liberator.
LATIN: O clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel: qui aperis, et nemo claudit; claudis, et nemo aperit: veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in tenebris.
ENGLISH:O Key of David, and scepter of the house of Israel, who opens and no man shuts, who shuts and no man opens: come, and bring forth the captive from his prison, he who sits in darkness and in the shadow of death.
Scripture Reference:
Isaiah 22:22
Revelation 3:7
Relevant verse of Veni, Veni Emmanuel:
O come, thou Key of David, come,
And open wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Do not fall into the trap of thinking that the we are dealing with events isolated solely in the past. Even taking just the image of the key in Scripture, we see how God’s plan is still in effect for us today, and we are all still players in his plan for salvation. The Old Testament reference from Isaiah helps us see this.
In Isaiah we read how the Lord said to Shebna, who was the master of the household of King Hezekiah:
“And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will call my servant Eliakim the son of Helkias, and I will clothe him with thy robe, and will strengthen him with thy girdle, and will give thy power into his hand: and he shall be as a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to the house of Juda. And I will lay the key of the house of David upon his shoulder: and he shall open, and none shall shut: and he shall shut and none shall open. And I will fasten him as a peg in a sure place, and he shall be for a throne of glory to the house of his father”.
God established in the House of David an office to be handed down through a succession, an office of jurisdiction. The vicar of the Davidic King would exercise the King’s authority.
This same language and image was used by our Lord when in Matthew 16 He conferred His own authority on Peter to exercise as a office to be handed down in a succession. The Lord, the David King Priest Messiah, gave His keys to Peter. His clear intent, clear from the David key image He used, was to establish an office with a succession.
In Revelation 3:7 the Lord is described as He who still wields David’s key. Even as Peter holds the keys on earth, it is the Lord’s own hand which holds Peter’s hand.
Truly the Lord who came to us at Bethlehem is with us always in His Church until His ultimate Coming at the end of the world. He is, in a real sense, the Key itself which Peter wields to open doors and to shut, to bind chains and to loose.
Let’s sing about the Key with the help of the terrific Benedictine monks of Le Barroux. NB: They don’t use the flat “ti”.
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As for Latin…
"But if, in any layman who is indeed imbued with literature, ignorance of the Latin language, which we can truly call the 'catholic' language, indicates a certain sluggishness in his love toward the Church, how much more fitting it is that each and every cleric should be adequately practiced and skilled in that language!" - Pius XI
"Let us realize that this remark of Cicero (Brutus 37, 140) can be in a certain way referred to [young lay people]: 'It is not so much a matter of distinction to know Latin as it is disgraceful not to know it.'" - St. John Paul II
Grant unto thy Church, we beseech Thee, O merciful God, that She, being gathered together by the Holy Ghost, may be in no wise troubled by attack from her foes. O God, who by sin art offended and by penance pacified, mercifully regard the prayers of Thy people making supplication unto Thee,and turn away the scourges of Thine anger which we deserve for our sins. Almighty and Everlasting God, in whose Hand are the power and the government of every realm: look down upon and help the Christian people that the heathen nations who trust in the fierceness of their own might may be crushed by the power of thine Arm. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. R. Amen.
A continuation of our look at the 
Since the beginning of December, Holy Mother Church has been imitating the Lord on the Road to Emmaus.
This year’s Winter Solstice is marked in special ways.
The great churches of Christendom served also as accurate clocks and sometimes you see on the interior pavement an analemma where a shaft of sunlight darts to the floor. There is a great example of this in Rome at Santa Maria degli Angeli.
Here is something that I wrote a while back. Since today in the Vetus Ordo calendar is the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, I figured that it might be good to share for those who haven’t seen it.
We continue our look at the 
