Advent decor, 2019

We now are entering into the middle of the liturgical season of Advent. This year, the twelfth of December will mark “Gaudete Sunday,” the third Sunday of this four-Sunday season. Arithmetically, this amounts to nearly the longest possible wait from Gaudete Sunday to Christmas Day, expanding this year’s Advent season to four full weeks. During those weeks, we are called to “prepare the way of the Lord,” to await his “Advent” - from ad-venire: his “coming to” us. Many have noted the threefold sense of this Advent: in his nativity, in his final return, and ever within our hearts. This third advent separates us from a perspective of history that looks back to his birth, and from an anticipation that looks forward to an unknown eschatological future, and places us squarely in the here and now. And while shaped by history and directed to eternity, liturgy most surely lives and moves and has its being in the here and now. How does our Advent liturgical life reflect this?

One of the principle gestures of Advent liturgy is simplification. We suppress the Gloria, awaiting again the angelic choir that proclaimed it at the first Christmas. Even with purple vestments, we do not find the intensity of an Ash Wednesday, nor the fanfare of a Palm Sunday. The liturgical life of the Advent season demands neither great feasting nor great fasting. The Advent wreath, manifest in our homes and our sanctuaries, quietly serving as a kind of artificially-illumined sundial, marks for us the time remaining before the True Light enters into the world. Its circularity, like the rosary, speaks silently of eternity, and return. Liturgically, the season offers little resembling the outbursts of the marketing, glitz, or entertainment that prevail in our greater secular culture, that proclaims a Christmas prematurely. Neither, at Portsmouth, does our School calendar not fully cooperate with our liturgical calendar, as our vacation means the departure of much of school community for the arrival of Christmas, though this does provide a more contemplative setting and facilitates a monastic retreat. 
 

Advent Vespers, 2019

Our Liturgy of the Word reminds us repeatedly and insistently, yet without decoration, of God’s promise and of our penance. Advent announces itself in our liturgies in our seasonal readings, collects, hymns, and other prayers. Most notably, by the end of the present week, we will rediscover the O Antiphons, which mark a period of time extending from December 17-24. These distinctive antiphons appear late in Advent Vespers, as Christmas day approaches, and announce what for many is a special, distinctively prayerful time in the liturgical year. The seven O antiphons each draw on verses of Scripture containing terms transformed into messianic titles: Sapientia (Wisdom); Adonai (Holy Lord); Radix Jesse (Root of Jesse); Clavis David (Key of David); Oriens (Dayspring or Morning Star; Rex Gentium (King of the Nations); Emmanuel (God-with-us). Last winter, Fr. Gregory Havill noted in an article on these antiphons that the reverse acronym these titles produce - “ERO CRAS” - means “Tomorrow, I will come.” (audio files of these chants are collected here.)
 

Prior Michael, School Advent Service 2019

There does seem to be something distinctively Benedictine about this season. Yes, this claim is of course colored by our own monastic setting, but the very character of the season resonates with monastic life. Advent is about the rediscovery, the constant rediscovery, of prayer. Our liturgical prayer rediscovers itself situated amidst a calendar and the flow of sanctified time and the transformation of our time into God’s. Many homes echo this, equipped with an Advent Calendar, highlighting the heightened temporal awareness of this sacred season. Here, the antiphons of our eucharistic celebrations appear in the very first pages of our graduales, as time circles back to its Origin. We rediscover a sanctification of the hours as the daylight dwindles (for us in the northern hemisphere), and we consider and experience more forcefully the duration of a day. Many discover a renewal of gratitude for a liturgical life centered and re-centered in the Divine Office.  

Our readings and meditations also speak again of that primordial monastic virtue of humility: the shocking humility of the Incarnation, within frail and mortal human flesh, of the infinite and eternal Creator. This awareness is expressed, for example, when the monastic community kneels as Vespers close, from the prayer, “Lord, have mercy on us.” Fr. Joseph Feders, O.S.B. notes how pervasive the Advent character is in Benedictine life: 

Introit for Gaudete Sunday
 

As we arrive at Gaudete Sunday, our liturgy reminds of where this is all leading. It conveys the sense of hope that springs up within humility, as Saint Benedict expresses in chapter seven of the Rule, when his monk finishes the twelvefold ladder between heaven and earth: “Now, therefore, after ascending all these steps of humility, the monk will quickly arrive at that perfect love of God which casts out fear (I John 4:18). Through this love, all that he once performed with dread, he will now begin to observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit and delight in virtue. All this the Lord will by the Holy Spirit graciously manifest in his workman now cleansed of vice and sins.” Our first reading in Sunday’s Liturgy of the Word harmonizes with this chorus, and summarizes the hope underlying all of the liturgy of this season of preparation: “Shout for joy, O daughter Zion! Sing joyfully, O Israel! Be glad and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!” (Zep 3:14).