Antiphons

Sunrise over Rome, seen from a terrace above Trastevere. The light of a new day lifting the city out of darkness. A city whose history is written in blood, beauty and stone, and the power and glory of the gods. Where pilgrims and tourists come with their burdens of faith and doubt, their yearnings for eternity and their restless quest for novelty. Sights ticked off the bucket list. The Colosseum. The Vatican. Piazza Navona, where Bernini’s muscular river gods sport themselves on the site where Saint Agnes was martyred. They say she is the patron saint of young girls, chastity, rape survivors, and the children of Mary. In secret churches darkly lit, the Virgin weeps and feeds the hungry child. Does she weep for all the virgin martyrs who were told that purity is more sacred than life?

In St Peter’s Square, Bernini’s columns wrap protective arms around the crib with its timeless story of hope reborn. As evening falls, the Christmas tree glitters its cryptic promises to the silhouetted figures gathered around. An old woman shuffles past on feet made huge by plastic wrappings, her body wrapped in a bin liner. From somewhere inside comes the cry of an aging and frail pope, begging the world to listen before it’s too late.

I fly home, marveling at the guilty miracle of flight. There are no pure miracles, nor is there any pure truth. Truth must be mined from the hidden depths of all that is unsaid. All that cannot be said. All that has disappeared and left only bones and stones as traces of stories that have never been told.

Miracles are messy mysteries that heal the world. Purity does savage violence to the muddle and mire of human life.

At home, I clamber across the dunes as the sky blushes in preparation for the dawn. Perhaps she blushes because she sees what we humans do to one another under cover of darkness.

I meet a neighbour and we talk about the romance and anxiety of Christmas. The rituals that sustain us and the ruptures that undo us. I tell her how my father used to take my sisters and me out to gaze at the sky every Christmas Eve. Every year, he saw Santa and his reindeers streaming across the African night. We could not see the sleigh, he said, because we were looking in the wrong place. Every Christmas Eve, I still go out and look up at the sky, knowing that if I only knew where and how to look, I would see the sleigh. Sometimes my grandchildren say they see it. My father murmurs his delight from far beyond the starry sky. My friend tells me how her grandfather used to take her brother and her to Midnight Mass, their little bodies tucked inside his sheepskin coat that stank of Players No 6, with a hipflask of whisky in the pocket. We spoke of Christmas days undone by demons rattling out of cupboards, drunkenly emboldened by the compulsory cheerfulness of our family gatherings.

Here, between the dunes and the receding tide, our stories are as ephemeral as jet trails, dissolving and disappearing before we’ve had time to discover where they are going. Around us, the little dogs scamper across the beach, yapping in ecstasy. The gulls toss their bodies into spirals of air like confetti sprinkled from a hidden hand. They have something to tell us, if only we knew how to listen. Wind and sand, tides and seasons, wipe away our footprints, the marks we leave on the world, leaving only the wordless mystery. We grope blindly for a story that will redeem the times.

I’m listening to Radio 3 on my earphones. The first glimpse of the sun over the horizon coincides serendipitously with the soaring climax of Felix Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Op. 27. Serendipity is another word for miracle, or grace.

The music and the waves. Small boats tossed against the wind. Children hungry. Mothers weeping. Fathers carrying the burden of responsibility and hope. No coats to wrap their little bodies in. Don’t they know there is no room, no room, no room at the inn? No warming breath of ox and ass. No wise men. Only fools and the deadly barge. No room, no room. No room for the stranger. The immigrant. The impure. Stop the small boats.

The ocean opens her arms to their soft flesh and drinks the warmth from their bodies. They leave only traces of bone and stone, with all their stories untold.

We are in the time of the Great Advent Antiphons. O Clavis David. Oh Key of David. Malcolm Guite guides us through these ancient mysteries in poetry and music.

O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel;
qui aperis, et nemo claudit;
claudis, et nemo aperit:
veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris,
sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis. 

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

Tomorrow, the Antiphon will see the light of justice rising over the horizon: 

O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae,
et sol justitiae:
veni, et illumina sedentes
in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Dayspring,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

Guite writes, “The Translation which gives ‘Dayspring’ for Oriens I especially love, … because ‘Dayspring’ suggests at one and the same time, both light and water, two primal goods in life which I love in combination, especially light reflected on water”.

Tomorrow, the water might reflect the light. Today, if only he would come and lead the prisoners from the prison house.

(This was written yesterday, 20th December and edited and posted today, 21st December)