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Volume 32, Number 4 |
Richardton, ND 58652 |
October 2004 |
Anticipation
by Elias Thienpont, OSB
Think back, remember and reflect on when you were young. The anticipation and excitement that Christmas held: the sounds of Christmas carols; the lights on house or tree; the aroma of the Christmas tree; the flavors of roast beef or turkey with dressing; the gathering of family. Christmas is a season that truly appeals to the senses, and as such these stimuli evoke deep and hopefully pleasant memories: memories generated season after season, building on and reinforcing each other into a web of conscious and unconscious emotions that build a reality all of their own.
From a purely religious standpoint, this is a good thing; it brings Christ and God deeper and deeper into our lives and makes his Spirit a living part of our lives. From a strictly social standpoint, it is a good thing; it builds a common history for both family and community. But it is also well known that the holidays are also a time of anxiety or depression for many, especially when events or life's circumstances do not live up to the anticipation that is rightfully there.
And now the start of the Christmas season, driven by retailers, gets earlier and
earlier each year, until you have retail giants like Wal-
Properly the season begins with Advent. Advent sort of sneaks up on us. The great feast of Christ the King is a fitting cap to the end of the Ordinary Year, and then we slip into the Advent Season without any fanfare. Purple vestments appear and the Advent Wreath is set up. In the monastery it is in the refectory (dining room). There are evocative prayers and songs that go with the weekly lightings of the wreath. “Drop down dews, heavens from above; let the clouds rain down the Just One.” It is a refrain that grows year upon year, gathering depth and meaning.
On December 17th the “O Antiphons” enter into our liturgy. They mark a shift into a sense of deeper anticipation. We allow the outdoor holiday lights to be turned on for the first time. If you are familiar with all seven verses of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” then you already know the essence of these ancient antiphons on which the hymn was based, the chanting of which fills the monastic choirs with beauty and grace.
The Midnight Mass is not the climax of the Christmas season: it is the beginning. In the parish the Christmas crib is blessed; in the monastic dining room, it is simply there. For those who are observant, the Three Wise Men are on a different table at the east end of the room. By the feast of the Epiphany, they will have made it to the crib.
But while some people may take their trees down on the day after Christmas, ours stays up past the New Year, past Epiphany, all the way to the end of the Christmas Season on the Feast of our Lord's Baptism. (And in the old days, the season ran all the way to the feast of the Candlemas on February 2.)
The Christmas season has a flow of its own: from a sense of anticipation building in Advent to the start of the season on Christmas Day, through its liturgical ups and downs in an Octave that sees both the joys of the Incarnate Saviour and the defeats of Saint Stephen and the Holy Innocents, through the Epiphany of the Wise Men as Christ is shown to the whole world in the breadth of his reign and bounty, to the Baptism where Christ is initiated as one of his own people.
In the monastic community we feel the importance of ignoring the “Civil Christmas” in favor of the real event with all of its emotional impacts. Long after everybody else's lights are dark and boxed, the lights on our trees remain: remaining faithful to the Season of Christ.
The “Season of Wal-
And then, the season of Christmas does end. We turn back in our hymnals to Ordinary Time, and the ordinary hymns shine with a new radiance, with a resonance, a beauty, and a meaning that sometimes gets hidden in familiarity. These ordinary hymns glisten and sound a clear tone that brings to the ordinary the deeper realities and mysteries of life. And bringing Christ into the ordinary is exactly what Christian life is all about.
