FROM The Liturgical Yearby Dom Prosper Guéranger, on today’s Feast of the Epiphany:
There was another custom, which originated in the Ages of Faith, and which is still observed in many countries. In honour of the Three Kings, who came from the East to adore the Babe of Bethlehem, each family chose one of its members to be King. The choice was thus made. The family kept a feast, which was an allusion to the third of the Epiphany-Mysteries – the Feast of Cana in Galilee – a Cake was served up, and he who took the piece which had a certain secret mark, was proclaimed the King of the day. Two portions of the cake were reserved for the poor, in whom honour was thus paid to the Infant Jesus and his Blessed Mother; for, on this Day of the triumph of Him, who, though King, was humble and poor, it was fitting that the poor should have a share in the general joy. (more…)
FROM sermons on today’s Feast of the Epiphany delivered more than 1,500 years ago by Pope St. Leo the Great (ca. A.D. 395-461):
…The story of the magi is not only a bygone fact in history, but of everyday application to ourselves. The day, dearly-beloved, on which Christ the Saviour of the world first appeared to the nations must be venerated by us with holy worship: and today those joys must be entertained in our hearts which existed in the breasts of the three magi, when, aroused by the sign and leading of a new star, which they believed to have been promised, they fell down in presence of the King of heaven and earth. For that day has not so passed away that the mighty work, which was then revealed, has passed away with it, and that nothing but the report of the thing has come down to us for faith to receive and memory to celebrate; seeing that, by the oft-repeated gift of God, our times daily enjoy the fruit of what the first age possessed. And therefore, although the narrative which is read to us from the Gospel properly records those days on which the three men, who had neither been taught by the prophets’ predictions nor instructed by the testimony of the law, came to acknowledge God from the furthest parts of the East, yet we behold this same thing more clearly and abundantly carried on now in the enlightenment of all those who are called, since the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled when he says, “the Lord has laid bare His holy arm in the sight of all the nations, and all the nations upon earth have seen the salvation which is from the Lord our God” and again, “and those to whom it has not been announced about Him shall see, and they who have not heard, shall understand.” (more…)
ORLANDE de Lassus’s 16th-century eight-part motet Omnes de Saba venient is a short responsory for the Epiphany, based on Isaiah 60:6. An English translation of the Latin:
ALL they from Sheba shall come,
bringing gold and frankincense
and proclaiming the praise of the Lord
Alleluia.
“IT IS still a strange story, though an old one, how they came out of orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of the mystery of magicians. That truth that is tradition has wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names; Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. But there came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in them the same curiosity that moves all the sages.They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales, but the truth of things; and since their truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward.”
— G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, Ignatius Press; p. 176
THE WISE MEN
Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.
Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,
And we know all things but the truth.
FROM kingdoms of wisdom secret and far
come Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar;
they ride through time, they ride through night
led by the star’s foretelling light.
Crowning the skies the star of morning, star of dayspring, calls:
clear on the hilltop its sharp radiance falls
lighting the stable and the broken walls
where the prince lies.
Gold from the veins of earth he brings,
red gold to crown the King of Kings.
Power and glory here behold
shut in a talisman of gold.
UBI CARITAS et amor, Deus ibi est. Ubi Caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor. Exsultemus, et in ipso jucundemur. Timeamus, et amemus Deum vivum. Et ex corde diligamus nos sincero.
NAMES are mysterious confluences of the universal and particular, of the past and the present. A name that has been used for thousands of years takes on new meaning in a new generation. A name is phonetic music. Take the names “Emma” and “George.” Could Emma Bovary have been a George? Could George Washington have been an Emma? It is difficult to grasp all the psychological effects and associations names conjure.
The sweetest and most beautiful name in heaven and earth, a name that is a universe and eternity in itself, a name that resounds through history like no other, is the sacred name of Jesus. It is entirely particular and entirely universal; supernatural and earthly like no other. St. Bernard wrote that the name of Jesus is food, light and medicine. So powerful is the Holy Name that people constantly invoke it in everyday life, some blasphemously.
It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that the Church set aside a specific day on which to revere and celebrate the Most Holy Name of Jesus. How right it is to honor the name itself, implicitly recognizing the supreme importance of words in our lives. In Hebrew custom, a male child was named at circumcision. The Feast of the Holy Name, celebrated today on the traditional calendar, comes right after the Feast of the Circumcision. Dom Prosper Guéranger wrote about this important tradition in his work The Liturgical Year:
In the Old Covenant, the Name of God inspired fear and awe: nor was the honour of pronouncing it granted to all the children of Israel. We can understand this. God had not yet come down from heaven to live on earth, and converse with men; he had not yet taken upon himself our poor nature, and become Man like ourselves; the sweet Name expressive of love and tenderness, could not be applied to him.
But, when the fulness of time had come – when the mystery of love was about to be revealed – then did heaven send down the Name of ‘Jesus’ to our earth, as a pledge of the speedy coming of him who was to bear it. (more…)
“I THINK of this new year as a white page given to me by your Father, on which He will write, day by day, whatever His divine good pleasure has planned. I shall now write at the top of the page, with complete confidence: Domine, fac de me sicut vis, ‘Lord, do with me what You will’, and at the bottom I already write my Amen to all the proposals of Your divine will. Yes Lord, yes to all the joys, the sorrows, the graces, the hardships prepared for me, which You will reveal to me day by day. Grant that my Amen may be the Pascal Amen, (more…)
NEW Year’s Day is a secular holiday, but it has beautiful mystical significance as well. Today is the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord. A little primer:
Why is this day so called?
Because the secular year begins with this day, as the ecclesiastical year begins with the first Sunday of Advent.
What should we do on this day?
An offering for the new year should be made to God, asking His grace that we may spend the year in a holy manner, for the welfare of the soul.
Why do we wish each other a “happy new year?”
Because to do so is an act of Christian love; but this wish should come from the heart, and not merely from worldly politeness, otherwise we would be like heathens, (Matt. v. 47.) and receive no other reward than they.
There is a massacre of innocents going on, and though we do not hear the cries of mothers or the moans of little children, yet the slaughter is more cruel than that of King Herod recorded in St. Matthew’s Gospel, for it deprives of physical and spiritual life; it sends children unbaptized into eternity, and brings about race suicide. And not only is thie destruction of the child’s life within the nine months before its birth a fearful deed forbidden by the fifth commandment of God, but any wilful act or desire to prevent human life, in any shape or form, is a crime against Nature which the God of Nature will visit with dreadful punishments. The small family, brought about by the effective wish of husband and wife, is an immoral condition which ruins souls and bodies. Those who set limits to divine Providence by preventing the offspring, violate the holy laws of God, defeat the end for which marriage was instituted, brutalize the sacred relations between man and wife, and criminally contribute to the physical, mental and moral degeneracy of the nation.
Lorenzo Maitani and Associates; The Slaughter of the Innocents
Hymn: Salvete Flores
All Hail! ye infant Martyr flowers,
Cut off in life’s first dawning hours:
As rosebuds snapt in temptest strife,
When Herod sought your Saviors life.
You, tender flock of lambs, we sing,
First victims slain for Christ your King:
Beside the very altar, gay
With palms and crowns, ye seem to play. (more…)
It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. — G.K. Chesterton
[N]o other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold or too frivolous, or too formal and classical, or too simple and savage, or too occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene with the sense that he was going home. He might admire it because it was poetical, or because it was philosophical or any number of other things in separation; but not because it was itself. The truth is that there is a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story on human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a mere legend or the life of a great man. It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our minds to greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which are turned into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero worship. It does not exactly work outwards, adventurously to the wonders to be found at the ends of the earth. (more…)
FROM New Heaven, New War
– —- by Robert Southwell, S.J. (Above, the poem is part of Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols)
This little babe, so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake.
Though he himself for cold do shake,
For in this weak unarmèd wise
The gates of hell he will surprise.
With tears he fights and wins the field;
His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries,
His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns cold and need,
And feeble flesh his warrior’s steed.
