If we want to understand the twin feasts of Christmas and Epiphany in their true liturgical meaning, we have to unlearn and to explore a great many commonly accepted things. We should be most willing to do so if we don't want our Liturgy to be just a beautiful relic or some ossified pomp without connection with twentieth-century life. The winter cycle of the Christian year is a very complex one and has become strange territory to the minds of most of us.
Of course we could sit down and say: "Well, if it has come to be thus, why not leave it as it is? Aren't you simply indulging in a time-honored fad of excavating ruins for a certain leisure class of intellectuals who are dissatisfied with the common fare of ordinary people? You should not encourage such tendencies of the proud and fastidious. The humble and poor will not follow you anyhow. All you will achieve will be the restlessness of a few more bright people with over-sensitive tastes, dissatisfied with their home-made parish services. They will scatter discontent and upset our parish routine, and they will not be any happier themselves." In other words, let us keep up blissful ignorance and maintain the level of our present standards.
My answer to these critics is: I am sorry, but I have to disturb you. The "truth will out," and deplorable symptoms show that the established way of celebrating Christmas does not prevent a rapid decay of the true Christmas spirit. I don't know what your remedies are. Mine is a proposal to follow the old idea of the Church to enlighten the people and to make them think differently and more correctly, so that then they may also act more correctly. So, here we go.
We said we have to unlearn a few things. That is necessary, and we shall see why. First of all, let us remember that the Church year has two cycles and not three, at least not in the Liturgy of our Missal and Breviary. These two can be most aptly described as the first or Paschal cycle, and the second or Advent cycle. Sounds a bit startling, doesn't it? But we shall see that the shock which toppled the accepted edifice of our notions about the liturgical year was a sort of slum clearance of our minds: a beautiful old building appears after the incongruous and somehow unsightly obstructions have fallen.
Next, let us, for the time being at least, forget our accepted notion that New Year's Day is anything more than a civic event. Liturgically it is certainly neither the end of anything except the octave of Christmas, nor the beginning of any-thing at all. Our New Year's Eve devotions are a concession to modern minds, but they have no bearing whatever on the liturgical development of the Church year. Now don't be a liturgical fanatic. Don't boycott them, because it would sadden your pastor and your friends. Just give them the right place in your mind, as important for your civic life, your parish, but irrelevant for the liturgical understanding of the Advent or second cycle of the Church year.
Worse than this, almost offensive to pious ears, as some people might call it, is my second appeal: forget also for the time being even the idea that the first Sunday in Advent was the beginning of something basically new. I assume that my readers have already cast out of their minds the idea that the four Sundays of Advent symbolize the "four thousand" years before Christ. That idea should have been forgotten long ago. In Milan they have six Advent Sundays, in the Eastern Church something entirely different. Even in our Roman Liturgy there have been periods of five and six Advent Sundays. This is only incidental, and because some old class books still carry this idea as if nothing had happened. Why say those things?—the people like it—because it is not the likes of the people, which will serve the people. This idea of the "four thousand years" does not fit into a liturgical understanding, which is, after all, what we need now. The first Sunday in Advent is not a caesura, as if there were a deep gap between the last Sunday after Pentecost and the first Sunday of Advent.
The word Advent, Adventus, refers to the whole season which has its climax in the Feast of the Epiphany or Theophany. But does this not lessen the status of our beloved Christmas day? Well, if it does, don't accuse the writer. It is liturgical law that the rank of January 6 is higher than that of December 25, and this is not just stickling, for we shall see later that there is a profound reason for it, even if people nowadays ignore it. By the way: in Rome Befana has kept its old rank beside or above Natale, Christmas.
I suppose my readers are eager to know when this season of Advent begins in the liturgical books and when it ends, always remembering that this Adventus is a larger unit than what we nowadays call Advent.
If you are looking for something very abrupt, you will be disappointed. The Roman Liturgy is never abrupt, theatrical, bombastic, and if occa-sionally one gets such an impression, then some-thing is wrong. Just as night and day flow gently into one another, and as the four seasons develop imperceptibly, the Liturgy is something live, growing and organic. There is never anything frantic, hasty, theatrical in the Liturgy. The Roman spirit is one of virile moderation and majesty. It was this Roman spirit which made the Liturgy. The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, like a leaven, and never like a thunderbolt or an earthquake. Who does not recall the sweetness of early spring, when there are still patches of snow on the ground, yet some of the trees are beginning to unfold the buds of their flowers and leaves? The color symphony of our American Indian summer comes tactfully and gradully, not with a bang.
In mid-September we have a group of holy days which suggest harvest; the ember days and the triumphal feast of the Holy Cross (September 14). Around these sacred harvest celebrations, when the leaves begin to turn, we also have the eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Through its psalms and lessons and prayers there sounds a faint tinkle of Christmas bells, that grow more distinct as the Sundays advance. All Saints and All Souls again strike the note of harvest, but even more, they let us glimpse through the half-open gate into the eternal glory of heaven. That is one of the leading motifs of this great season.
Like the mighty brass mellowed by sweet violins of hope and consolation, the last Sunday after Pentecost and the first Sunday of Advent reveal the grandiose theme of the vision of Christ's return, his Parousia: the first, in its terror to Satan and stubborn sinners; the second, with the silver tinge of hope: "Lift up your heads, because the time of your salvation is nigh."
The orchestra of psalms and hymns, of lessons and prayers, never drops these themes: eternity, glory and parousia. The composer of this celestial symphony then adds two more instruments: the voice of John the Baptist, strong and austere, and of Our Lady, humble, virginal and pure. It is a constant crescendo from the faint pianissimo of the early fall towards the majestic, fulfilled sound of the parousia motif on Christmas and Epiphany, sounding in its last powerful accord on the second day of February, forty days after Christmas, the beautiful feast of Candlemas.
Here again the last notes of the Advent theme are blended with the first inkling of the new Paschal cycle which sends out its first messengers on Septuagesima Sunday. The arch of this season spans the interval from the eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost to the last Sunday after Epiphany, from Holy Cross to Candlemas.
The grandiose sweep of this liturgical architecture of themes and motifs is visible only after its central theme and mood have been unearthed from medieval and later debris. It would explode the narrow limits of an informal article if we went on to describe the beautiful analogous structure of the Paschal cycle, out of which the Advent cycle flows as the more contemplative heavenward eternity-laden one.
"What men have done to Christmas!" one could exclaim, if he compared the present vision of this cycle, riveted on the foreground alone, with what he finds in the liturgical books. What have men done? They have taken only partial glimpses of this rich fullness, as if the majestic aspects were too overwhelming, until only disconnected isolated feasts were visible. When you look on a gigantic chain of snow-capped mountains you see how they belong to each other. The same chain submerged under a deep ocean, shows only disconnected small islands above the surface. You have to let the water recede, as after the great flood, to understand the whole structure.
The idyllic, emotional, affective attitude of the late middle ages created this flood of submerging forgetfulness and ignorance. Religion as a commodity of life, as an escape, Marx would say "a drug"—encouraged this attitude in the bourgeois age; we seem to want the nice little things which smooth the edges of life, not that dynamic, fiery power which purified the Roman Empire and burned out all the straw and wood from its edifice until nothing but the true gold remained, to become the temporal shell of Christ's Body, the Holy Roman Church. No wonder this view will at first appear as a frightening vision of eternal values, naked, challenging: mysterium tremendum.
Now, should we go and burn all our beautiful hand-carved cribs, our cozy Christmas trees, our sweet Christmas cards with warm, sweet babes in stables, ox and ass included? Are all our naive shepherd songs to go, the three wise men, the woolly, white poetry of our Nordic winter solstice? Even if our forefathers, those stern men like Leo, Gregory, Ambrose, Augustine and Damasus, those titanic poets, as Sedulius, Venantius and their companions, composed this wonderful drama, are we, the refined, gentle or bourgeois men and women of a dying era, made to stand their sober, grand architecture? We don't build basilicas with mosaics and romanesque minsters. Our churches have a drawing-room atmosphere, respectable, full of holy knick-knacks and comfortable things. So why should we live intellectually and spiritually on mountain tops of sublime spirituality?
The answer? "Qui bene distinguit, bene docet": of course nobody advocates throwing present practices into the ash can (or dust bin, if you happen to live in England). Who said so? I don't know if the present general attitude towards the Advent cycle is healthy and as thoroughly Catholic as it should be. A generation whose whole being does not clamor after final resurrection seems to have lost practical faith in it; its creed is at best a docile recitation. If that generation has no objections to our unjust world and does not cry continually in its soul, with tears of despair, after a better world in which justice is King—"Ecce advenit dominator Dominus" (Introit of Epiphany)—then there is some suspicion that its Christians don't hunger and thirst any more after justice but are a lot of smug bourgeois, whose life is a pretty picture of comfort, framed with the gilt-edge of a partial religion (for dark hours, and a sort of insurance for an uncertain hereafter).
No wonder that communists and nazis (and capitalists) lost patience with us and staged their own Parousia, with heaven for the many elect and hell for the few "privileged" of old. People who like this world so well that they don't like to hear about the New Earth and Heaven, must have done something to their faith.
But we can keep all our modern, beloved Christmas trappings, as long as we see through them and as long as we know that there is a reality and a future behind those things of the past. When we celebrate Midnight Mass in Bethlehem "at the crib" as the Missal says, when we go as good pilgrims to the Mass "at dawn" in the Church of the Anastasis (Resurrection), and when we see the full glory of the Divine Child in the third Mass, we have already made a seven-league step from the crib idyll towards the full meaning of the Parousia.
The first coming of the Word is the transparent stained glass through which shine the refracted rays of His final triumph. This seems complex and hard to explain. Who says it should be "explained"? Explaining kills it as much as theoretical analysis kills Schubert's unfinished symphony, or an X-ray kills a Cimabue madonna. Celebrate it, live it, plunge into its visions, words, tunes and pictures. The composite gives a simple and profound result in our souls, not a playful savoring of the past, a little comfort here, a small consolation there, and so much childlike reminiscing. It is the sound of the organ of eternity which involves us and carries us forward, and faith becomes a dynamic power, not soothing, but propelling us irresistibly in mighty supernatural rhythms. Certainly our crib and things have their place and nobody will take them away; but they have their place, and their place is the foreground, the emotional, historical, meditative side of our religious being. Still, while the world moves on in powerful strides and groans for redemption, let us not forget that not the Babe redeemed it, but the Babe grown Man, crucified, resurrected and sitting at the right hand of the Father, whence He will come to judge the living and the dead.
Thus, after the more gentle portals of Christmas are passed, and Nativity-Advent has raised us a step nearer to the Son of Man in His mysteries, we shall be able to understand the most majestic of all His feasts: Theophany, when His Godhead shines through His humanity and the Church sings: "Rise, be light, Jerusalem, for thy Light is come and the Glory of the Lord is risen upon thee .... " "Upon a high throne I saw a Man sitting, whom the multitude of spirits adore, singing together: Behold Him, the name of whose empire is to eternity."
