Back when I was observant and monastic, following the four week season of Advent modified my otherwise always-off internal Christmas clock. I loved Advent; my favorite liturgical season, really.
Truth be told, I don't think I lived the resurrection life very often but I could certainly identify with a season dedicated to waiting for incarnation.
Advent is a strange season. The first Sunday is dominated by the image of the Return of Christ and the End of the World. Then it calms down and moves into Isaiah and John the Baptist and the Virgin. What starts out with a cosmic bang comes to completion not quite with a whimper but with the sounds of a newborn in a barn.
The spare old chants for Advent had a way of lingering, sung as they often were in chill and dark December evenings. It seemed to me the most Romanesque of times, the music and ceremonies both calm and peaceful while full of longing and awareness of absence.
Rorate caeli desuper et nubes pluant Justum:
Shower down, o heavens, from above and let clouds rain down The Just One.
Aspiciens a longe et ecce video Dei potentiam venientem et nebulam totam terram tegentem. Ite obviam ei et dicite, Nuntia nobis si tu es ipse qui regnaturus es in populo Israel.
Gazing from afar off, behold I see the power of God coming and a cloud covering the whole earth. Go out to meet him and say: Tell us if you are He who is to reign among your people Israel.
And the wonderful O antiphons on the seven Vespers before Christmas, with these titles:
O Sapientia. O Adonai. O Radix Jesse. O Clavis David. O Oriens. O Rex Gentium. O Emmanuel.
2 comments:
It seems a shame that you can't just "compartmentalize" -- maintain your androphile sexual life, while also attending mass. Your psyche is surely complex enough to fill both these compartments with rich contents. And obviously the homoeroticism and Christian worship have various deep as well as obvious conduits between them which you could tune into as you wish while at mass, as perhaps you tuned into them while with B. ... One of the great bêtises of our religion in its mainline prot and V2 catholic era was the admonition against "compartmentalization," which is both necessary and beneficial, and from early childhood onward (e.g. being a 'different person' at home with one's parents than when one is out with one's friends. ...Yes, compartmentalization can be done in bogus ways, but mainline "protestantism" and "spirit of Second Vatican" Catholicism would have undone their modes and orders ab initio had they admonish'd bogusness.
The year and the Holy days...I sometimes read things on a site where people collect/confess their odder childhood beliefs. (iusedtobelieve.com) Apparently a not uncommon idea some kids have is that Jesus is born /every/ Christmas, grows up by spring, dies every Good Friday, is resurrected every Easter, and round and round it goes.
I like this 'theology', and not just because of Frazer.
--Nathan
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