Apologies and Break

As you would have noticed by now, my attempt to provide daily reflections on the “O” Antiphons has failed miserably.  Sorry about that.  Things in my life are a somewhat uncertain right now, as my last post might have suggested, and I haven’t had the time to devote to much writing that would be worth your time.

I’m going to take a break from now until Great Theophany (January 6th), mostly in an attempt to wait in silence, enjoy the festival season and think about my near future.

Until then, I ask for your prayers, and promise you mine.

Wei-Hsien

Come, O Wisdom: Thoughts Later in the Day

As I thought about the questions I asked myself in the post this morning, I realized how rarely and how little I regard the Lord as Wisdom.

For the last few years, I’ve been in a long battle with United States immigration authorities over my green card application, and it now looks like it’s a battle that can no longer be won. Looking back, I’ve relied on just about everyone: recommended attorneys, legal counselors, senatorial connections, people with influence in DC. My life these last few months has been a frantic scramble because there’s always one more person I could try talking to, one more lawyer I could consult, one more road to try.

Last Saturday evening, at Vespers, it was as though I heard for the first time these words in the litanies of so many Byzantine services: “Let us commit ourselves and one another, and our whole lives to Christ our God”. I realized at that moment that I’d committed myself pretty much to everyone except Christ our God.

He is the One who alone holds my destiny in His hands. He is the Wisdom and Word of God, spoken by the Father, who “orders all things well”. If Christ is who I profess Him to be, then perhaps it’s time I learn to commit myself to Him after all.

Come, O Wisdom

Today, December 17th, at the start of the final week of Advent, the Roman Church begins its venerable tradition of singing the Greater Antiphons or “O” Antiphons (so-called because they all begin with that vocative) at the celebration of Vespers (Evening Prayer). These antiphons, each of which bestows a title on our Lord Jesus Christ, are the verses of the well-known hymn, O Come, O Come Immanuel. I’ll post a series of daily reflections on each of these titles as I myself work through them in preparation for the Nativity.

The first of the “O” Antiphons is:

LATIN: O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviter disponensque omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

ENGLISH: O Wisdom, who came out of the mouth of the Most High, reaching from end to end and ordering all things mightily and sweetly: come and teach us the way of prudence.

The most basic meaning of “wisdom” (Hebrew: hokmah) in the Old Testament is not what we would call today “head knowledge”, but “skill”. Wisdom, according to the Bible, is the ability to make something or to order something. Hence, wisdom is attributed to the architects of the Ark of the Covenant (31.3-6; 35.25; 35.35), where most Bible translations actually translate hokmah as “ability” or “skill”. In another passage, I Kings 2.6, “wisdom” refers to political tact.

Used with reference to man, wisdom refers to one’s ability to make something or to organize something according to one’s purpose. With reference to God, the meaning of wisdom is not entirely different: it refers to His skill in creating the heavens and the earth and all that is in it, as well as His genius in ordering or governing that creation. The former is demonstrated in the design and beauty of God’s creatures; the latter is displayed in the working of history by which Creation processes, as it were, toward the fulfillment of His purpose. This is where the Fathers found the idea of God’s “two books”: the Book of Creation, which shows forth God’s craftsmanship, and the Book of Scripture, which records God’s brilliant ordering of history to bring about the salvation of the human race.

At a certain point in Israel’s history, wisdom began to be spoken of as a person rather an abstract quality. What is of interest for us here is this change as it applied to God’s own wisdom. In the Book of Proverbs, the wisdom of God is personified as One begotten by God and the “master workman” by whom God created all things (Proverbs 8.22, 30). This personification of Wisdom extends all the way to Wisdom of Solomon, one of the latest works of Israel’s wisdom literature, usually dated around the 2nd century BC. In the Wisdom of Solomon, the personification of Wisdom reaches, in my opinion, its Old Testament climax. I supply the following quotation with my annotations.

For Wisdom is more mobile than any motion;
because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.
For she is the Breath of the Power of God,
and pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty [see Hebrews 1.3, where Christ is called "the reflection of God's glory"];
therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.
For she is a reflection of eternal light [John 1.4; also the Creed's "Light from Light"],
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness [Paul calls Christ "the image of the invisible God" in Colossians 1.15].
Though she is but one, she can do all things,
and while remaining in herself, she renews all things [the declaration of Christ in Revelation 21.5];
in every generation she passes into holy souls
and makes them friends of God [in other words, justifies sinners, as Christ does], and prophets;
for God loves nothing so much as the man who lives with wisdom.

(Wisdom 7.24-28)

As I’ve tried to show above, the New Testament authors (and the Fathers who followed in their footsteps) readily applied the wisdom-language of the Old Testament to Jesus Christ. Thus, the Wisdom of God is shown to be not merely an attribute of God but a real Person, the Word spoken by the Father and the One whom we call the Only-begotten Son of God. Jesus Christ is the enfleshment or incarnation of the Word of God, of Whom John says, “all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made” (John 1.3). He is Wisdom, the “master workman” spoken of in Proverbs 8.30, in and through whom God made the universe and governs it in history. In Jesus, the invisible wisdom of God that is hidden in the very fabric of Creation and History takes on human form. In His face we see the genius, the design, and the glory of God. He is the Icon (Image) of God’s Skill in the world and in our lives.

The words of our antiphon are based on Wisdom of Solomon 8.1, which speaks of Wisdom as One who “reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other” and who “orders all things well”. It is this Wisdom who, as Paul says, upholds the universe by His word of power (Hebrews 1.3).

If Jesus is God’s Wisdom Incarnate, if He is indeed the One who orders Creation and History, is He my wisdom also?

To whose voice do I listen, to whom do I turn for counsel, for direction in my life? Do I listen for His voice in the Scriptures and in the life of the Church, or do I scramble after the professional gurus of marketing, success and self-help—or the advice and example of characters in TV shows and movies?

On whom do I rely to make things in my life “work”? Is my life subject to a blueprint of my own making, or am striving, again and again, to commit myself and my whole life Christ, the Wisdom of God?

Fr. Alvin Kimel on Disbelieving the Predestinarian God

Why do Western Christians fear God? Might not it be because the God who saves and damns in absolute, inscrutable determination still haunts our imaginations? When confronted with such a deity, we will always urgently ask the question “How can I get a gracious God?” Hidden deep below all conscious thought lies the knowledge that perhaps, just perhaps, God has abandoned us, abandoned “me,” unto perdition. And so God himself becomes our enemy. The holy Creator becomes Satan!

But even if the hard predestinarianism is pushed into the theological and homiletical background, it continues to do its insidious work. If we are unsure, even to the tiniest degree, that God wills the good of every human being—if “I” am uncertain that he wills “my” good—then we must find ways to negotiate with him. Thus the creation of the quid pro quo transactionalism that often characterized late medieval spirituality and church life, against which Martin Luther so powerfully protested. To what extent does this transactionalism still shape the spiritual lives of Catholics and Protestants today?

From Fr. Alvin Kimel’s latest post on Pontifications

Some Questions Regarding “Young Adult Ministry”, Etc.

I am what some people in our church circles would call a “young adult”, although what exactly makes me such a specimen is not entirely clear. It seems to me that the term generally designates someone who has passed into chronological adulthood but does not yet have the psychological maturity to handle it. So we get together and canonize this protracted youth (let’s not be afraid to call it that) as a new stage in human development—one that requires its own kind of “ministry”, complete with rosary hikes and Paintball Nights. There was a time when children were simply initiated into adulthood and were expected to live according to a new order, but that is no more—not in our churches, at least. We’ve made it hip to be an in-between: no longer one but not quite the other.

I’m very, very confused by the designation, primarily because what qualifies a person as “young adult” seems to be some sort of limbo-living in vocational uncertainty. It is the general consensus of my other young adult friends that, when someone gets married and has children, he or she moves out of the “young adult” category and becomes, simply an “adult”. The same is the case for anyone who is ordained or who enters religious life: they exit young adulthood by default. It strikes me as particularly odd that these aforementioned persons might be an “adults” at 24, and that some others can still somehow be “young adults” at, say, 38.

Have we, as a Church, encouraged people to pitch tent and camp out at a particular point in their journey toward maturity—psychological, emotional, spiritual—in Christ? Insofar as Christians are supposed to mature like all other normal human beings, is a young adult ministry tailored exclusively to this “stage” of life just a Christian version of secular yuppiecentrism? (Pardon the neologism.) Is it a really good idea to create spaces in parish life where twenty- and thirty-somethings can gather in a predominantly (if not exclusively) peer-governed ethos? Our very Catholic notion of Tradition, in my opinion, militates against such practice. For one, Tradition presupposes that bearers of the whole Christian way of life pass it on to recipients in a kind of trans-generational movement, not merely on the level of conveyance of information, but on the level of practice—incarnation, if you will—of the Gospel. This transmission, it appears to me, ought to be organic and holistic, the natural consequence of a shared life in the parish, not mechanically executed via a young adult program.

But maybe all this is just part of a larger problem, namely, the need-based segregation that dominates so many Catholic parishes in this country. Our churches are divided according into age groups, or according to their stage in the married life, or some other construct of “need”, and then catered to (“served”) uniquely with specific programs and even liturgies, quite apart from other “groups” in the parish.

But what effect does this kind of age-based segregation have on our perception of the local parish as a family in which each Christian is responsible for the other? What effect does it have on our concept of Tradition as Christian discipleship taught from one generation to another—the Tradition of which every person baptized into Christ is a bearer?