O Great Mystery
merry Christmas
O great mystery and wondrous sacrament,
that animals should see the newborn Lord lying in their Manger!
Blessed is the Virgin whose womb was worthy to bear the Lord Jesus Christ.
A few words I am praying with and a few thoughts to brighten and deepen all the shades of wonder and mystery of the day.
First, it’s absolutely important for you to have this playlist I made several Christmases ago, which consists of 38 different versions of Morten Lauridsen’s setting of “O Magnum Mysterium.” It is the only soundtrack ever needed for Christmas Day. I waited until December 21, the darkest day of the year, to break it out when I was making St. Lucia Day Buns.
On the word "Virgo," the altos sing a dissonant appoggiatura G-sharp. It's the only tone in the entire work that is foreign to the main key of D. That note stands out against a consonant backdrop as if a sonic light has suddenly been focused upon it, edifying its meaning. It is the most important note in the piece.
That’s a quote by Mr. Lauridsen from his canonical 2009 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that explains how one single note can contain endless wellsprings of theological mystery and break your heart and enchant you and crack you open wide enough for heaven.
Second: (I suppose this is seasonally out of date now), but my friend Sue’s mother, Nancy Sullivan, wrote this beautiful reflection for her church on Advent, which was, perhaps, the best thing I read about Advent this Advent.
My granddaughter has no knowledge yet of prey and predator; no concept of mortal enemies. Instead, she sees “big and little” and “mommy and baby”. And so, the brontosaurus is a guest of the T-Rex, the tiger lies down with the kangaroo, and the snake and the zebra browse together. Life through the hopeful, uncynical eyes of a child.
That’s what Advent asks of us this Christmas, to see life with fresh eyes. To see God’s grace breaking into the most painful and unlikely of circumstances. To imagine that things can be different because Jesus is born, both in history and in our times, Christ among us, Emmanuel.
Third: (seriously) a prayer for a ceasefire because 20,000 innocent people have been killed this autumn in your name and in mine.
For as often as pro-Palestine speech is described as an existential menace to Jews in Israel and across America, our major newspapers are saturated with equally plausible incitements to violence — for that, my friends, is what it means to support a war. The difference is that when the New York Times editorial board defends the bombardment of Gaza or urges lawmakers to send Israel more Hellfire missiles, this may not look like incitement because the violence in question is endorsed by the White House, funded by Congress, and normalized by the media. There is no denying that this is an American war, even if there are no American boots on the ground. — Andrea Long Chu in The Intelligencer
Fourth: Two Brits on Mary:
First, Rowan Williams writes of Mary’s flesh giving the Word flesh:
For the Word is never for human beings in general, but is always colored by a secret connection special to each. And this would be hers, that she had waited with the Word, her patience and her impatience bound up in and with the Word’s as if God in her, bringing the divine purpose to reality, was learning the patience of flesh and the risks and hurts that make up the world.
As Caryll Houselander would remind us:
It is Our Lady—and no other saint—whom we can really imitate. All the canonized saints had special vocations, and special gifts for their fulfillment.
Each saint has his special work: one person’s work.
But Our Lady had to include in her vocation, in her life’s work, the essential thing that was to be hidden in every other vocation, in every life. She is not only human; she is humanity. The one thing that she did and does is the one thing that we all have to do, namely, to bear Christ into the world.
We think of her as unquestioningly important, but she did not seem so to herself, sitting in a cave in Bethlehem, far from her parents, her aunts, and cousins to help her give birth. How lonely that happiest moment of her life must have been. That moment gave time meaning, and that moment in time is the meaning of all our lives.
Sometimes it may seem to us that there is no purpose to our lives, that going day after day for years to this office or that school or factory is nothing else but waste and weariness. But it may be that God has sent us there because but for us, Christ would not be there. If our being there means that Christ is there, that alone makes it worthwhile.
Emmanuel is with us, in us, in our broken, grieving hearts, in our lives that somehow persist after death, in those far from home, in the missing, in the lost—with us in the rubble.
Merry Christmas.
