A second Advent thought

It's time to ask ourselves: what is Christmas?

The answer is easy: Noel, i.e. a birthday.

Whose birthday? Well, the answer to this is a bit more complex: one man's and everybody's.

I'll try to explain what I mean.

What do we do at birthdays? Here it is easy again: we throw a party and bring gifts to the person whose birth day it is. Why? To say that we are glad that he or she was born. With the birth, we celebrate the joy it brought into our lives. No matter how much we care for that person, that remains ideally the truth.

Is that all? I could be asked. At Christmas we exchange gifts: does that mean that we don't do anything more than to celebrate each other's birth?

No, we do more, for the very fact that we do it in that same day, in spite of the fact that it isn't our birthday.

Many people today might think that it is just a convention, tied to old beliefs of our society that they don't hold anymore, and don't care to know about.

It's a pity. Because if they did, they could learn something about human nature that they prefer to ignore: i.e., that conventions have a reason.

If we bring gifts to each other, it is because we have been graced with gifts before. That's why not all birthdays are equal. Think of what is in a large family the birthday of a grandparent. I remember my mother's and my mother in law's eightieth birthday: it was a great family celebration – like saying: thank to you we are all here, alive and loving each other.

In the life of a state some personage's birthday might be remembered and celebrated even after his death: just think of Washington birthday.

So, if we all exchange gifts in that same day we still call noel, even though it isn't actually our birthday, it is because we celebrate, by doing it, the very capacity of finding joy in each other's existence. And we celebrate with it, whether we acknowledge it or not, the birth of someone, the one to whom we owe this capacity, for which we give therefore thanks.

He is born anew anytime that we love our neighbors, engendering in each other the joy of life.

Now is the time of his coming, to sing, at Christmas, the new born king.

HP

Mary and the Church

I remember reading many years ago an essay by H. U. von Balthasar (to the judgment of many, including your HP, the main Catholic theologian of the Twentieth Century), entitled "Who is the Church". I was at the beginning of my philosophical and theological studies, and I expected some dissertation on the people in the Church, and what makes them faithful members of it. I tell you my surprise when I found the essay asserting the identification of the "who the church is" in Peter and Mary, in order to discuss the relation between the two.

It is far from our mentality to think of individual persons as representative of a collectivity, but that is the way Christians have been thinking for centuries. In this key, Peter and Mary (as well as the other important persons surrounding Christ in the New testament, like John and Paul), are primary figures of the different components of the Church that sprung from him.

Well, Peter represents the express leading office, liturgical and doctrinal, in the Church; but it is such only in as far as he is at the service of Mary, who represents the spiritual fecundity of the Church. Peter, in his fallibility, is preserved unerring by adhering to Mary.

Without these premises I could not comment on the Magnificat, and how it refers traditional Old Testament warlike images of God assisting his people – as he who "shewed might in his arm", "scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart", "put down the mighty from their seat" and "exalted the humble" – to what happens in a woman's womb.

Not just that woman's womb, whom all generations shall call blessed, but the Church's womb.

It is the divine fecundity of any man and woman in the Church. But carnally it is women who carry any baby by whom the kingdom is to grow.

Here I need another erudite quote to explain what this meant in Christian civilization – what it meant, I say, because now days it is heavily under attack.

The great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye wrote a book entitled The secular scripture, in which he analyzed the late antiquity novels as expression of popular culture. Their typical plot was the adventures of two lovers, a hero and a heroin both of high birth, severed before they could marry, running in search of each other, falling in the hands of pirates or such like things, until they could finally reunite and be joined in marriage.

I mention it, because of an important observation by Frye. Both lovers were very attentive in preserving their virginity: he from the seduction of some femme fatal, she from the threat of rape by pirates or other nasty men. As always, though, the main emphasis fell on the woman's virginity: it is with her that the loss of it could have the gravest consequences! Frye remarked that by preserving her virginity the heroin differentiated herself from promiscuous little servants, shepherdesses, peasants women. A king's daughter, she had to bear a king's son.

It comes to my mind, on this regard, Elisabeth of Pride and Prejudice, when, in her dialogue with Darcy's aunt, lady Catherine, who wants to keep her from marrying him, retorts: "He is a gentleman, I am a gentleman's daughter."

In Christian marriage, however, with its monogamous requirement, every man and woman is a king (or a gentleman) and a king's (or a gentleman's) daughter. Because they all represent the Church's womb, from which they again give birth to a king.

John Adams understood this: that there are two ways of conceiving democracy, that there are no kings or that everybody is called to be king. He stood for the second, but there is a widespread tendency toward the first. As always, mostly represented in sexual mores.

Since the late Sixties, promiscuousness seems to have won the day. It has been portrayed as the result of a movement of emancipation, making everybody free in his pursuit, if not precisely of happiness, at least of pleasure. But Frye's remark makes me strongly suspicious that it was rather the opposite, turning all men and women into servants.

That's when we are no longer able to say, with Mary, "he that is mighty, hath done great things to me".

HP

Advent and Mary (to be cont’d)

The LD has reminded the meaning of Advent: hopeful expectation of the heavenly King to come, born of an earthly woman to liberate mankind from the power of the diabolon, the divisive one, who holds all men and women in fetters, prisoners of that concern about themselves that makes them incapable of communicating in peace and justice.

In our democratic society we are not used to take this Christian talk of kingship (in spite of the last Sunday before Advent) seriously. The only one to my knowledge who did it was the second President of the USA, John Adams; and he run into trouble because of it, being judged unworthy of a scrap of monument in Washington, he, the son of a yeoman from Massachusetts, over against the great one deserved by the true democrat slaveholder from Virginia.

At best we take this king talk as a kind of metaphor drawn from worldly political reality to express something religious. Even metaphors, however, don't work if we don't grant any reality to the image that is vehicle for us of further meanings. But it is not a metaphor that a young woman gave birth to a child to be named Jesus, later proclaimed the Christ (the anointed one, as ancient Israel's kings were) by people who perceived him as the bearer of reconciliation among men, made participant of the caritas that Deus est.

In short, they perceived in him the beginning of a new kingdom of peace and justice.

The beginning: that is the problem. Therefore the LD rightly reminded that Advent is a time of spiritual warfare: of a resolve toward an always new birth of the king by which the kingdom can grow.

The place where the war is decided is a woman's womb.

Let's read Mary's great hymn of praise in the gospel of s. Luke known a Magnificat (Douay-Rheims translation).

My soul doth magnify the Lord.

And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid;

for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

Because he that is mighty,

hath done great things to me;

and holy is his name.

And his mercy is from generation unto generations,

to them that fear him.

He hath shewed might in his arm:

he hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat,

and hath exalted the humble.

He hath filled the hungry with good things;

and the rich he hath sent empty away.

He hath received Israel his servant,

being mindful of his mercy:

As he spoke to our fathers,

to Abraham and to his seed for ever.

 

HP

It is Advent again, in case you had not noticed (and you would not have, if all you do is read this blog).

As we approach Gaudete! Sunday, I would like, however belatedly, to get into the spirit of the season.

To that end, i have transcribed the Advent announcement from Vatican Radio, which aired on the evening of Pope Benedict's celebration of the First Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent:

Advent is the first of the liturgical seasons: its coming marks the turning of the liturgical year. Advent is a privileged season - a time the Church ahs set aside for prayerful reflection on the truth we know by faith: that Christ, the Glorious King, is coming soon to judge the world.

The Church in Advent waits in joyful hope for the coming of her Savior, and in preparation for that coming, she does penance and makes acts of reparation for past sins.In her official public worship, the Church proclaims Christ the Lord of creation, and implores the protection of His merciful divinity from the insults of the enemy, Satan, the Prince of Darkness, who, sensing that the time of his reign is nearing its end, increases his efforts to ensnare and enslave the children of God.

Advent is a season of war - of spiritual strife between the victorious forces of God, and the defeated though active, not yet fully vanquished forces of the fallen angels.

In this preternatural struggle for the souls of those for whom Christ won His supernatural victory, the People of God in the New Israel that is the Church cry out for deliverance with increasing intensity, and they do so in the voice, and with the prayers of ancient Israel.

The final seven days of Advent hear proclaimed the ancient O! antiphons - the cry of the heart of the People of God: O Wisdom! O Lord and Leader! O Shoot of Jesse! O Key of David! O RIsing Sun! O King! O Emmanuel! (The great spiritual adventure that is Advent begins again this Saturday at Vespers)

If I am not mistaken, the HP is reasonably well-acquainted with the reporter who wrote the text.

Those who heard the piece when it aired noticed the use of the Conditor alme siderum at the beginning, and the Veni, veni Emmanuel at the end.

Two of this Lazy Disciple's favorite hymns.

LD