Preferring Nothing to Christ

Priest and Poet, Malcolm Guite, has put together a beautiful poetry anthology for Advent. You can find this on his blog linked below or in his book, Waiting on the Word. There’s poem for each day. The first is Christina Rossetti’s Advent Sunday.

ADVENT SUNDAY

BEHOLD, the Bridegroom cometh: go ye out
With lighted lamps and garlands round about
To meet Him in a rapture with a shout.
It may be at the midnight, black as pitch,
Earth shall cast up her poor, cast up her rich.
It may be at the crowing of the cock
Earth shall upheave her depth, uproot her rock.
For lo, the Bridegroom fetcheth home the Bride:
His Hands are Hands she knows, she knows His Side.
Like pure Rebekah at the appointed place,
Veiled, she unveils her face to meet His Face.
Like great Queen Esther in her triumphing,
She triumphs in the Presence of her King.
His Eyes are as a Dove’s, and she’s Dove-eyed;
He knows His lovely mirror, sister, Bride.
He speaks with Dove-voice of exceeding love,
And she with love-voice of an answering Dove.
Behold, the Bridegroom cometh: go we out
With lamps ablaze and garlands round about
To meet Him in a rapture with a shout.

Christina Rossetti

Advent Sunday:Christina Rossetti

FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT

THE ANNUNCIATION OF THE MESSIAH’S COMING

The liturgy of Advent now turns its full attention to the coming birth of the Lord. The antiphons concentrate on it: for example, the entrance antiphon, “Drop down dew from above, you heavens, and let the clouds rain down the Just One; let the earth be opened and bring forth a Savior” (Isa 45: 8); and the communion antiphon, “Behold, a Virgin shall conceive and bear a son; and his name will be called Emmanuel” (Isa 7: 14). We are making a definite transition, therefore, to the other major theme of the Advent liturgy: expectation of the incarnation of the Word.

Adrien Nocent OSB, The Liturgical Year

Advent IV
Pour forth, we beseech you, O Lord,
your grace into our hearts,
that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ your Son
was made known by the message of an angel,
may, by his passion and cross,
be brought to the glory of his resurrection.

The collect for the fourth Sunday of Advent is found in some sixty manuscript sources from the eighth century onwards and was popularized in the Angelus. 

This collect prepares us for the gospel of the day and is comprehensive in setting out the whole mystery of salvation – from the moment of the annunciation, through the incarnation, to the passion and cross, and finally to the resurrection.  In this great arc of God’s action in Christ, we are brought to glory.  The petition of this collect, that God’s grace is poured forth into our hearts, opens us up to the realization of what is going on, of what God is achieving in us as we journey through the liturgical celebrations of these mysteries.  It is a grace that is, characteristically, poured out as “gift for you: a full measure, pressed down shaken together, and running over . . .”  This is a good example of the sort of oblique scriptural allusion which abounds in the phrases of these old Roman collects.

These prayers of Advent set out the liturgical-theological store.  The collects of the Roman liturgy represent an astonishing treasure house of new and old – the publicly spoken and awe-inspired proclamation across the generations of what God has done for us in Christ.  These prayers maybe deserve more attention and more care than they often receive.

Adrian Porter SJ

THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT

THE MESSIANIC AGE
This Sunday is marked by a note of joy. The joy has two causes: the proximate coming of the Lord in the Incarnation and his return at the end of time.

The readings emphasise the presence amongst us of the Messianic Age and the Kingdom. The theme of the reversal of the world’s ways is seen in the First Reading from Isaiah and the Gospel text from Matthew. It is the mission of each one of us to prepare the way for the Lord and to proclaim the Good News. Fulfilment of the this mission requires conversion. If one really is to be the instrument of Christ, one must be divested of self. The Church and her members have an obligation not to stand between humanity and the light but rather to bear witness to the light.

(Based on Adrien Nocent OSB, The Liturgical Year)

Advent III
O God, who see how your people
faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s nativity,
enable us, we pray,
to attain the joys of so great a salvation
and to celebrate them always
with solemn worship and glad rejoicing.

The collect of the third Sunday is the only Advent collect to use the “qui” construction which is the standard way of composing a collect-type prayer: God is called upon (“O God . . .”) and then some characteristic or action identified (using the qui clause, “who . . .”) which makes it clear that an aspect of God’s being or action (“who see how your people faithfully await . . .”) can assist us in the specific thing we pray for (“the joys of salvation” and “celebration” and “glad rejoicing”).  This is followed by the fixed Trinitarian formula (as Christian believers in the God who is Three in One we pray to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit) and the people make the prayer their own by acclaiming “Amen”.

This collect was sourced for the new missal from the sixth century Ravenna Scroll. It presents us with the powerful image of God seeing his people, expectantly and constantly, keeping them in view, as they await the feast of the Lord’s nativity.  God waits on us.  We wait on the coming of the Lord on the feast day.  This state of affairs, we pray, will lead us to the joys of salvation and the jubilation of the liturgical celebration.

The themes of joy (gaudia) and jubilation (laetitia) echo the introit of this Gaudete Sunday (“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice.” and is presumably one of the reasons the compilers of the revised missal recovered this ancient collect and returned it to use in the liturgy.

Adrian Porter SJ

PREPARE THE WAY

The gospels chosen for the Second Sunday of Advent all have as their theme the preparation of the way of the Lord. John’s urgent warning has echoed throughout the world ever since he spoke it, and as it reaches us today it has a twofold reference: prepare for the Lord’s coming at Christmas, but prepare also for his return on the last day.

John uses uncompromising words to emphasize the need of conversion and of purifying baptism: ‘His is winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire’. The image is harsh, its meaning inescapable; it is difficult simply to ignore John’s warning and close one’s ears. Preparing the way for the Lord requires a constant effort at conversion: ‘Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.’

Adrien Nocent, OSB

Advent II
Almighty and merciful God,
may no earthly undertaking hinder those
who set out in haste to meet your Son,
but may our learning of heavenly wisdom
gain us admittance to his company.

Again, there is the idea of setting out in haste to meet the coming Christ, as we did the previous Sunday. And we pray that nothing, no earthly preoccupations (opera terreni), hinder our hurrying, so that (introducing a new idea here) we may be schooled (eruditio) in heavenly ways of thinking (sapientiae caelestis).  This echoes the epistle for Advent II C: “never stop improving your knowledge and deepening your perception so that you can always recognize what is best.”

This opposition of earthly concerns and heavenly ways is a common theme of collects but here the language is much more direct and memorable – the hindrance of earthly undertakings and the learning of heavenly wisdom.  This is precisely the sort of thing that can begin to inform a homily or introduction to the Mass.  The effect of this better choice of heavenly things is that it obtains for us admission into the company of Jesus.  As we learn heavenly wisdom from the Master, we become his disciples.  Christ becomes our way, our truth and our life rather than earthly preoccupations.

Fr Adrian Porter, SJ

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT
WATCH AND PRAY
The words ‘vigilant waiting’ capture the mood of the First Sunday of Advent. This expectation is hopeful and is seen in the entrance Antiphon: ‘To you, I lift up my soul, O my God. In you, I have trusted; let me not be put to shame.’
Foremost in the Church’s mind is the expectation of the last day and the judgement it will bring. The faithful must advance courageously to meet the Lord; they are called to enter into the kingdom at the day of judgement.

Advent I
Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,
the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ
with righteous deeds at his coming,
so that, gathered at his right hand,
they may be worthy to possess the heavenly Kingdom.

We pray for the “resolve” to meet the coming Christ with good deeds and thereby to merit possession of the heavenly kingdom.  This resolve comes not from ourselves but from Christ.   If we are truly God’s faithful people, then our good deeds should naturally be part of who we are as we run forth to meet Christ at his coming.  Our meriting the heavenly kingdom is, as St Paul teaches, “not having righteousness of my own . . . but that which is through faith in Christ . . .”[23]  The collect employs a vivid allusion to the gospel of the sheep and the goats[24] as we are “gathered at his right hand” with the sheep.

The phrase “at his coming” reflects the Advent focus on Christ’s first coming at his incarnation, celebrated in the Christmas feast, and his second coming at the end of time.  A particular change in the way prayers are translated in the 2010 English missal is to revert to referring to God’s people (the congregation here gathered in the liturgical assembly) as “they” rather than “we”.  This can still feel strange to those brought up on the 1971 translation but, as well as rendering the Latin more accurately, it makes us ask the question “Do I want to be part of this ‘they’?”  It no longer makes the easy, and perhaps presumptuous assumption, that I am one of the runners forth with righteous deeds – the prayer genuinely becomes a petition-prayer, begging this Advent grace for myself.

Adrian Porter sj

Advent focusses our attention of the prophecies of Hope in the Old and New Testament. Each day we are invited to turn to the Lord and wait for him to come to us. Whenever the Liturgy of the Word invites us to hope, it is always a call to deeper love and faith.

‘Péguy, in one of his brilliant theological intuitions, saw hope as a little girl who goes off to school between her two big sisters, faith and love, holding each by the hand. He explains his meaning in his Le Porche de la Deuxième Vertu: In the eyes of those who see the three sisters passing, little hope is being guided by the other two; in fact, however, little hope is pulling forward the two who seem to be leading her. If Péguy is correct, then we must recognize that the distinction between these three fundamental attitudes of faith, hope, and love is not easily to be made.’

— The Liturgical Year, Vol. 1: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany by Adrien Nocent OSB

I have started every Advent for the past 30 years by reading these two paragraphs for Maria Boulding’s book, The Coming of God.

‘If you want God, and long for union with him, yet sometimes wonder what that means or whether it can mean anything at all, you are already walking with the God who comes.  If you are at times so weary and involved with the struggle of living that you have no strength even to want him, yet are still dissatisfied that you don’t, you are already keeping Advent in your life.  If you have ever had an obscure intuition that the truth of things is somehow better, greater, more wonderful than you deserve or desire, that the touch of God in your life stills you by its gentleness, that there is a mercy beyond anything you could ever suspect, you are already drawn into the central mystery of salvation.

Your hope is not a mocking dream: God creates in human hearts a huge desire and a sense of need, because he wants to fill them with the gift of himself.  It is because his self-sharing love is there first, forestalling any response or prayer from our side, that such hope can be in us.  WE cannot hope until we know, however obscurely, that there is something to hope for; if we have had no glimpse of a vision, we cannot conduct our lives with vision.  And yet we do: there is hope in us, and longing, because grace was there first.  God’s longing for us is the spring of ours for him.’

I don’t think I will ever tire of the ideas that are expressed here.
How do they strike you?

2 Samuel 5:1-3
Colossians 1:12-20
Luke 23:35-43

In the lead up to the Coronation of King Charles there was a good deal of commentary around what the ceremony itself might mean for our world today. There was also discussion of the role of the monarch. Is it an outmoded concept? Is it something which becomes redefined with each new monarch? In the biblical world prophets and kings are chosen by God and anointed. Kings are marked with God’s seal and are tasked with the care of God’s people, from the greatest to the least.

In the Liturgy today kingship is portrayed in three different ways: David, the one chosen and anointed, Christ the Lord and King of all heaven and earth and Christ, the Servant King, who promises the thief paradise.

In Luke’s Gospel we are invited to journey with Jesus to Jerusalem. We see Him as the fulfillment of all that was promised through David. As the first born of all creation He has walked among us and inaugurated the Reign of God. And now, as the journey ends, he hangs upon the cross as our Servant King.

It’s the image of the Servant King which speaks loudest to me this year. Luke’s portrayal of Jesus over these past weeks has taken us many times to the margins. There we find scenes that don’t conform to our tidy constructs of ‘who is in and who is out’. Both Jesus and the thieves now find themselves on the margins. They are outside the city walls, dying the death of the outcast and the disgraced. Into this darkness one thief speaks words of hope when he has the courage to ask to be remembered: remember me when you come into your kingdom. When Jesus replies it is with some of the most reassuring and tender words in Scripture: ‘Indeed, I promise you, today you will be with me in paradise.’ To the very last, Jesus, our Servant King, reaches out to those who find themselves on the margins.

Our Servant King walks among us today. Do we recognise him?

Just as there is an evil and bitter zeal that separates one from God and leads to hell, so too there is a good zeal that separates one from evil and leads to God and eternal life. Thus monks should practice this zeal with the warmest love: ‘Let then strive to be the first to honour one another.’ They should bear each other’s weakness of body and character with the utmost patience. They must compete with one another in obedience. No one should pursue what he considers advantageous to himself, but rather what benefits others. They must show selfless love to the brothers. Let then fear God out of love. They should love their abbot with sincere and humble charity. Let then prefer absolutely nothing to Christ, and may he lead us all together to everlasting life.
Ch 72, On the Good Zeal that Monks should have.

Ch 72 is considered to be the spiritual heart of the Rule of St Benedict. Some commentators suggest that this may have been written towards the end of Benedict’s life. We can hear the wisdom of someone who understands his brothers and what community life really entails. He offers a guide for the communal search for God and much of it concerns the ordering of prayer, work and relationships. These are solid, practical guidelines that are designed to ‘safeguard love’.

Throughout the Rule there is one central truth: Christ is really present in each member of the community. The love, respect and honour which we show to each other, we show to Christ. This love underpins all that happens in the monastery. We are all very different and yet we have all vowed to prefer nothing to Christ and trust that he will bring us ALTOGETHER to everlasting life.

Where in your own life are you called to prefer nothing to Christ?

Image: Turvey Abbey
These pictures were taken during a celebration of our Prioress’ feast day. This day ranks alongside Easter, Christmas etc in terms of solemnity and treats! Some of us might wear the same style of sandals, but we are all very different.

‘A brother may be assigned a burdensome task or something he cannot do. If so, he should with complete gentleness and obedience, accept the order given him. Should he see, however, that the weight of the burden is altogether too much for his strength, then he should choose the appropriate moment and explain patiently to his superior why he cannot perform the task. This he ought to do without pride, obstinacy or refusal. If after the explanation the superior is still determined to hold to his original order, then the junior must recognise that this is best for him. Trusting in God’s help, he must in love obey.’
Ch 68, Assignment of Impossible Tasks to a Brother

I have quoted this chapter in full. Lifting a sentence out of context could very easily give the wrong impression of St Benedict’s teaching. Every monastic will have found themselves in the position of something being asked of them which seems too big or burdensome. What this chapter highlights for me is the importance of respectful listening on both sides.

You might be wondering why a superior might insist on something even after the monastic has calmly explained the difficulties involved. One way of understanding this is to look at it from the superior’s perspective and to imagine that the superior sees deeper than the monastic. The superior sees the potential in the monastic and knows that they are in fact capable of what is being asked. It’s a form of encouragement.

In my own monastery we have an unwritten addendum to this chapter. Our Prioress will often begin by saying ‘This is a real question’. This means that you are free to say ‘no’ to what is being asked. This is very liberating. If you say ‘no’ it won’t be held against you. This, in fact, makes it easier to say ‘yes’!

Have you been in the position of asking something potentially burdensome of another in a family situation or work? What did you learn about yourself?

Image: Turvey Abbey
Shot through the chapel window, this is Sr Zoe Davis (Prioress) on the left and me on the right. I’m not being asked to do an impossible task, but I am using my hands to explain something!