AVECARNE

 

Advent, when I was young, was a penitential time, a sort of milder Lent. You gave up something and were encouraged to search your soul. The darkness of the season was also, perhaps, the darkness of your sinful self; and the awaited light of Christmas announced itself with a very cautious and meagre growth of candles. Christmas, that hybrid feast of salvation’s birth, light’s return and Saturnalia, would be the explosive reward after four to five weeks of deepening gloom. 

            There are things in today’s Church I do not like: the decline of solemnity and reverence; the frequent implication that the tired, the sad and the melancholy in the pews are bourgeois rentiers who need to be shaken out of what peace and comfort they have found; the relentless pursuit of the Second Commandment, in its NGO simplification, over the First. But among the good tendencies I cherish is the new interpretation of Advent. We are now encouraged to see it as a time of waiting: waiting for, and waiting upon. Waiting for the Coming that has always already come and is always still to come; waiting upon the holy, the silent, the infinitely vulnerable love of the infinite who waits upon us. 

            Lent is introduced by Carne-vale: a farewell to meat; but also a farewell to the flesh, to sarx in one Biblical sense: to the insistence of the bodily, the daily, the worldly. And in that, our farewell of course anticipates and echoes His farewell: His farewell to the flesh that He had taken on to be part of what He loved and wanted to save: our precious but lurching human race. The Passion and Resurrection are his carne-vale, a gradual one completed in the Ascension. 

            Seeing this helps me to understand Advent better. Not a carne-vale; but the gradual anticipation of an ave-carne – an in-carn-ation. A taking-on of the too, too sullied human flesh; the flesh that, whatever the spirit’s willingness, is always so movingly weak. The flesh that gives us pleasure, that accords us sometimes a foretaste of ecstatic joys; but that lets us down, that attacks, that suffers, that dies. In R.S. Thomas’s “The Coming”, the Son, peering down at the thin yearning arms on a small polluted globe, says, “Le me go there.” And in going, to us he comes. He takes on that carne, he in-carnates. 

            And we? By Isaiah and other seers, we have been given notice that this coming is coming. That is it is true and will be real. Knowing that, we wait. Waiting is different from the daily round: it is the daily round pointed toward something. But for what? We have been told that at “the end” there will be a Parousia, a final Second Coming; and as a whole and in the long run, we wait for that. Vigilantly, because we have been told that it, that He, will come silently and suddenly, like a thief in the night or like a most peculiar bridegroom. 

            But for now, in this Advent, what we immediately wait for is the ceremonial mini-Coming that annually renews the Great Promise. Soon, we shall re-enact the Nativity, but at the same time we shall light candles, celebrate Santa Lucia, eat massive meals in a season of no natural food, defy the darkness, sing of Yule, imitate a silly fake-Santa-Niclaus by giving each other things; in fact, we shall celebrate not only light but the Flesh: the Flesh that He honoured, and will honour again, by taking it on, by settling into it; by an Ave-Carne.

Image: Edward Weston (1886-1958) "Neil [his young son] Nude" (1925)

Advent Sunday

 

The First Sunday in Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. Advent, for many people, is either barely present in the rush of work, school, travel plans and buying presents, or it is seen as a kind of minor version of Lent, vaguely gloomy and depressing. I take this opportunity once again to quote in extenso the admirable Advent meditation of Dom David Bird OSB, a Benedictine monk.

During the season of Advent, the Church proposes for our attention four truths which are general enough and profound enough to shape our whole spiritual life.

 The first is that, whoever we are, whatever our vocation, whether our life is happy or sad, fulfilled or frustrated, useful or a waste of time, interesting or boring, in harmony with God or sinful, it is destined to change; and what we consider normal now will, one day, become a thing of the past. This is true at every level of life and for everybody, and is even true of the whole creation in which we live. All will eventually end, because God so wills it. God is not in favour of every change, but his Providence is at work in every change.

   The second Advent truth is that Christ is present in every change, even if the change has been brought about against his will, and, at the end of every change, Christ will manifest himself to each and every one of us in a new way, taking into account what has happened, if we allow him. This will go on happening until  his Second Coming in which the whole of creation will be transformed into a new heaven and a new earth, and his presence will be manifested in a new and definitive way.

   This Sunday we celebrate the presence among us of the Risen Christ, as we do every Sunday; but, because it is Advent, at the same time, we are warned not to be satisfied with the level of our Christian life, our own holiness or our degree of commitment, nor closed to Christ's challenges when they involve us in change.  While we are alive, we can be confident that Christ has much more for each of us, and that he wants to make us capable of receiving what he has to offer. He would prefer our firmament should cave in, our whole world collapse rather than allow us to sink into a mire of complacency that would make us impervious to his grace. The Church has given us Advent as an antidote to complacency.  To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often, as Blessed John Henry Newman said, and Christ wishes to accompany us; and, round every corner, after every change, Christ is ready to meet us, to offer us something new.

   The third Advent truth is that when we meet Christ, we never meet him alone. Christ is in heaven and does not leave it when he comes to meet us. Where Christ is, there are Our Lady, the angels and saints. Whether in the Mass where we meet him as a Church, or in our hearts when we meet him in prayer, or when we recognise him as present in every situation, heaven and earth become one. 

   We talk about Christ coming to us; but the early Church talked about our ascending into heaven, even as we remain physically on earth.   This is the theme of the Letter to the Hebrews and of the Apocalypse. It is a further paradox that, the more we are united to Christ who is in heaven, the more heaven is present on earth through us.

   Is it not strange that, in the early Church, when the Liturgy was at its most communal, when there was so much emphasis on the Church as the body of Christ, that Christians should have gone into the desert to become hermits? Was it a flight into non- Christian individualism? It may have been for some; but the classical Christian hermit was anything but an individualist. What united him or her to the Christian community was that both he or she and the community believed they were citizens of heaven before they were citizen of this world, precisely because they were members of Christ's risen body. The monk believed that, because of his own weakness, he could not really become what baptism had made him, a citizen of heaven, without entering a monastery or going into the desert.   Did you know that the word "cell", used for a monk's room, was believed to have the same root as "coelum" because, just as the Christian community was raised in the Eucharist to share in the liturgy of heaven, so the monk in his cell was raised up to heaven in his prayer, and his solitude was filled with Our Lady, the angels and saints who prayed with him, and even with all those on earth who are united to Christ in his risen body.  No space on earth was more populated than a hermit's cell! Moreover, people went to visit hermits and monasteries because they believed that, through the monks life of sacrifice and prayer, sacred spaces are formed where heaven and earth are united.

   The fourth Advent truth is that heaven changed radically when Jesus, having died and risen again, ascended into his Father's presence. The Incarnation had brought about a new relationship between God and his creation. When this relationship was perfected by Christ's obedience unto death and became the central reality in heaven by means of Christ's ascension, heaven became the new reality into which the whole human race and the whole of creation were destined to be transformed.   It became the ultimate destiny of all that is. Jesus said that this generation will not pass until all these things shall happen; and in a certain and real sense this is exactly what took place when Christ ascended into heaven. For this reason, the early Christians never changed the texts in which Christ foretold the end of the world. We are in the last days, not, as the Jehovah Witnesses believe, because some world-destroying calamity is about to happen, but because every time we celebrate Mass, every time we pray, every time we meet Christ in the circumstances of the present moment, we are brought into the Father's presence by Christ in the Spirit, and we share directly in heaven which is God's final solution for the whole of creation; and every time we go to Mass or simply pray, Christ, Our Lady, the angels and saints enter our world through and in us.

  Advent is the time when we remember that this life receives its value only in so far as it incarnates God's will revealed to our faith in Christ's presence.  As the gospel today teaches us, we must be awake, ready to receive him and not pass our time in debauchery and drunkenness.   In every situation we must pray, "Come, Lord Jesus," and he will be there. 

   In this world of change, we find Christ's will in the present moment. We must not try to re-create a past that is agreeable to us, because God's will is not to be found there. Nor must we seek our fulfilment in an imaginary future, because that is our own creation, not God's. We must find God's will where Christ is, in the present; but we must not be so attached to present circumstances that we try to hold on to them when it is God's will that they be changed. 

   We must become Advent Christians for whom everything in this world, past, present and to come, must make way for the Christ who comes. Only our self-will stands in the way.

 

Dom David Bird, OSB (from his blog Monks and Mermaids at http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.fr/

ADVENT AND BLESSEDNESS

In the Advent of this most peculiar calendar year, and thus in the beginning of a new liturgical year, it seemed to me that a few thoughts on the Sermon on the Mount might not be out of place. The Sermon, after all, is, we are told, the new Torah, the new Law; so that just as in Lent , before the celebration of the Redeemer we may usefully study the Law the obedience to which we invariably muck up enough to need redeeming. 

As in the New Testament, specifically Matthew's Gospel, I thought I would begin with what are usually known as the Beatitudes; of which the first is

BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT, FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

We do not know what Yeshua said in Aramaic, but whoever translated the shorthand notes of ‘Matthew the Exciseman’ into clear if clumsy Greek said it thus: ‘Makarioi hoi ptōchoi tōi pneumati, hoti autōn hè basileia tōn ouranōn.’  Let’s try to parse this. Makarios (some us are old enough to remember a Greek political bishop of that name) means ‘fortunate, lucky’ more than religiously ‘blessed’: but St Jerome clearly thought this unworthy of both the speaker and the occasion and translated it as Beati; and all English translators from Wyclif on followed him. A ptōchos in ordinary Greek is a beggar: here, though, it is at once metaphorised by being followed by ‘in the spirit’ (spiritus/pneuma/ruach, the great noun of which the meaning runs from Him Who brooded over the primeval waters in Genesis to the breath that comes out of our nose or mouth.  So it does not necessarily limit itself to the beggar in rags at the gate: a rich man may well be ptōchos tōi pneumati.

            Considering that these people, whoever they are, are fortunate, because theirs is the rule of the heavens, it seems important to find out who and what they are. How is one poor in spirit? To start with the highest: one cannot imagine that the Heavens will be ruled by those who have little of the Holy Spirit. Poor, perhaps, in divine inspiration? In a year of Covid-19 there are of course many who are poor in breath and hooked up to respirators; but those surely also are not meant. (If I sound deliberately obtuse it is because I’m trying to recover the way this must have read to those original readers who were not already converted.) The consensus among theologians is that those who are meant are those who are spiritually poor, and especially who are so in their own estimation: those who know that they have few resources and that they are dependent on the Father for literally everything. It is those who have that kind of humility, and therefore that kind of instinctive trusting dependence on the Father, who – beggars as they feel themselves to be – are fortunate, He reassures them. Why? Because theirs is – to them rightfully belongs – the basileia, the kingship, the rule, of the heavens. (ouranos in daily Greek was the sky, the vault of heaven, but also the heaven of the deities, a heaven which in the Old Testament’s Psalm 96/7 had become plural.)

            Goodness. The last shall be first, indeed. At least, those who see themselves as the last, those who do not think much of their powers, those who are, in fact, ‘as little children’, utterly dependent on their parent and content to be so because living in complete unquestioned trust. Those who, as Yeshua puts it later on in the same discourse, do not take thought for the morrow, but take each day as the Father sends it. Those who, like the Samaritan trader, interrupt their business trip when they chance upon a bleeding robbery-victim, take him to the nearest pub, tell the landlord to see to him, promise to pay all costs on the return journey, and go on to their destination. Those who, working in a hospital, do not think much about being saintly but just do their job and say a prayer while doing it. Those who, without metaphysics or other philosophy, can see that ‘heaven and earth are full of Thy glory’ because they are so little occupied with their career plan that they have eyes to spot glory, divinity, in all the tiny nooks and crannies where it lodges. 

            They are makarioi. Already here on earth, because being what they are they are happier than others: not given to bitching, kvetching, grouching, glooming, weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. And this happiness, this good fortune, this makaria, follows them to heaven. To heaven where, true to the ancient Athenian wisdom that governance should be given only to those who do not desire it, they will be placed in charge. It is a comfort to think that Heaven will be ruled by the simple, the einfach, the onefold, those for whom one Father, whose Will they happily do from day to day, is enough. 

            Now, who are they? Referred to here as a class, they might appear to us as people with a specific gift. Poverty of spirit: well, A has it, B doesn’t. Like blue eyes, or an inborn talent for mathematics. But the whole trend of the Sermon is not that way. The Sermon is the new Torah. The fulfilled, not the abolished, Torah. The Torah fulfilled in inwardness. So it is filled with what we should learn, learn to do, learn to understand, learn to become, as was the old Torah: see Psalm 119, which is a lingering love-song to that old Torah. Hence the ptōchoi tōi pneumati, those lucky, fortunate people, those makarioi, are Us. They are what we could be. What we should be. What we may be, if we learn not to be too clever or too ambitious or too rebellious for our own good.  

THE SILENCE OF ADVENT

Yule demands incessant busyness; Christmas demands waiting in silence. How to combine the two? Perhaps we can learn from the Carthusians. A novice-master tells a young monk the complexities of “silence”: to shut oneself up in cell for incessant prayer is not silence as the order’s Statues understand it. Opposed to “noise”, “silence” demands that we identify the source of the noise first, and when we do so we find that much of the clamour comes from one’s own heart. Outward silence does not still this, on the contrary: it invites it. True silence consists first of all of listening: you begin by listening to the others around you – not just what they say, but what they are not saying. You listen to what you can gather of their deep needs, feelings and concerns. Meanwhile, you go about your business – business-business or Yule business – but listening quietly to all you meet.

Once you learn to listen to others (for a Carthusian, “your brothers”, for the rest of us, our families, loved ones, and anyone else who comes our way), you have a much better chance of being able to listen to God. Why? Because your own self, your own ego, your own desires, wishes, prejudices, feelings, thoughts, temper, and what you will, have learnt to shut up. And this, says the old novice-master, is true Silence. Silence happens when your own self has learnt to be quiet. In true Silence, only God speaks. Sometimes in His own voice, in the ears of your heart; sometimes in the voice of your brothers, your sisters, and your neighbour.

And when that happens, you can go about your Yuletide busyness – buying presents, ordering the turkey, decorating the house, adorning the Christmas tree, sending cards, planning convivial meals and stocking up on whisky – in a perfect silence of waiting, of expectation, and of hope. The silence of Advent.  

AWAITING A FAVOURITE GUEST

I have been thinking about Advent, which this year has come in with a rush, slightly before I was ready for it. The admirable web clip “Advent in 2 minutes” reminds us, as do churches everywhere, that for Christians the season is one of awaiting a beloved guest whose coming is imminent. And in their naming of all the things Advent is not I was reminded that Christmas is of course also Yule: Yule with its perfectly pagan but enjoyable solstitian festivities, its eating, drinking and huge log fires, its exchange of gifts, its loud and happy Wassail songs, its evergreen tree and its colours of red and green. And I was reminded also that next to the notorious “War on Christmas” (from the curmudgeons who are annoyed by “Happy Holidays”) there exists also a continuing “War on Yule”, pursued by the faithful and the sensitive who every year feel their blood pressure rising at all this pagan commercialism. 

            Just as English is a hybrid language, composed in almost equal parts of Germanic and Latin roots, so the late-December holiday is a hybrid feast: part Dionysian Yule, part hushed and adoring attention and delicate celebration. Integrating the two is possible, indeed relatively easy, in a traditional society where both churchgoing and the Christmas goose are comfortable traditions, observed with care and happiness if not with excessive zeal and piety. It becomes much harder in a world where every tradition is systematically questioned and usually overturned, whether for reasons of impatience or from desire for novelty.  In such a world polemic tends to rear its unlovely head and conflict to ensue. If “peace on earth” is to begin at home, how to solve this difficulty?

          My own instinct would be to stop calling “Christmas” all that is really Yule, and vice versa. Unbelievers could happily wish one another “God Jul” as the Scandinavians do, and shops could sell Yule cards alongside Christmas cards. Christians who hate Yule could banish from their hearths as many of its characteristics as their children will allow; unbelievers could celebrate the Yule Dinner as they could the Yule Log. Christians who find that the culture of gift-giving interferes with the coming of the Saviour could give and receive their presents on the Eve of St Nicholas (December 5), as do the Dutch. The Christmas Tree could become the Yule Tree, and take its place among older English traditions of the season, like the Kissing Bough.

            For believers, Advent has moved – and I think happily so – from a minor penitential season, a sort of semi-Lent, to a season of waiting, awaiting, hope, and at least prospective joy. We await a favourite guest; so a little house-cleaning is in order. But to me the best preparation is to look around with care and attention and observe the sheer grinding, raging need of a world without faith: the misery of meaninglessness is piled on top of that of poverty, of illness, of solitude, until it is a wonder that vulnerable bodies and souls are not crushed by the peine forte et dure of unbelief.

            We are always being told by our churches to be missionaries: the thought seems to most of us outlandish. But when we look at the tragedy of indifference all around us, we can glean from it at the very least a motivation. This in no way diminishes the dilemma of action: we all know how those loudly proclaiming their faith and/or, worse, trying uninterruptedly to convert their friends produce new unbelievers as if by magic. So what can one do to counter the dark tide?

            An old spiritual adviser, wise in the ways of the soul, would probably tell us This is where ‘discernment’ comes in. And repeat the parable of the Good Samaritan. This last is a two-edged sword. In the first place, we are asked to identify, not with the Samaritan but with the victim: however secure we feel, in God’s eyes we are poor robbed and bleeding travellers, greatly in need of help. On the other hand, we may identify with the Samaritan himself, well-off but looked down on by the Chosen People as a Jewish tradesman might have been in the Paris or Vienna of 1900; and we might remember that he was not sermonising about the mounting number of robbery victims along the highways each year. He went about his business but kept his eyes open; and when he saw a bleeding figure in the bushes he did something. That is discernment. When life confronts us in a specific situation with someone suffering from unbelief (and yes, for many it is a suffering) as well as from other privations, then it may be possible to help in every way. Keep our eyes open; discernment.

            And, of course, there is Hope. Advent is par excellence the season of Hope. Surrounded by darkness and freezing fog and bone-piercing cold humidity, we do not give up, we do not give in to the night. Surrounded by the idiocy of Clown A and the venal rapacity of Clown B, not to mention the self-righteous demagoguery of Clown C, we do not give up on the prophecy, we do not surrender to the tempting idols that preen in every window and catalogue, nor to the bel canto of Cynicism and Despair singing in seductive harmony. We do not join the tempting troops of Anger, nor yet the raffish rakehelly rout of Entertainment. As we carefully tend the little oil-lamps of our vigil, we have our love to keep us warm.

And a glorious Christmas as well as a merry Yule to us all.

HAPPY NEW YEAR?

The First Sunday in Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. Advent, for many people, is either barely present in the rush of work, school, travel plans and buying presents, or it is seen as a kind of minor version of Lent, vaguely gloomy and depressing. I take this opportunity once again to quote in extenso the admirable Advent meditation of Dom David Bird OSB, a Benedictine monk.

During the season of Advent, the Church proposes for our attention four truths which are general enough and profound enough to shape our whole spiritual life.

 The first is that, whoever we are, whatever our vocation, whether our life is happy or sad, fulfilled or frustrated, useful or a waste of time, interesting or boring, in harmony with God or sinful, it is destined to change; and what we consider normal now will, one day, become a thing of the past. This is true at every level of life and for everybody, and is even true of the whole creation in which we live. All will eventually end, because God so wills it. God is not in favour of every change, but his Providence is at work in every change.

   The second Advent truth is that Christ is present in every change, even if the change has been brought about against his will, and, at the end of every change, Christ will manifest himself to each and every one of us in a new way, taking into account what has happened, if we allow him. This will go on happening until  his Second Coming in which the whole of creation will be transformed into a new heaven and a new earth, and his presence will be manifested in a new and definitive way.

   This Sunday we celebrate the presence among us of the Risen Christ, as we do every Sunday; but, because it is Advent, at the same time, we are warned not to be satisfied with the level of our Christian life, our own holiness or our degree of commitment, nor closed to Christ's challenges when they involve us in change.  While we are alive, we can be confident that Christ has much more for each of us, and that he wants to make us capable of receiving what he has to offer. He would prefer our firmament should cave in, our whole world collapse rather than allow us to sink into a mire of complacency that would make us impervious to his grace. The Church has given us Advent as an antidote to complacency.  To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often, as Blessed John Henry Newman said, and Christ wishes to accompany us; and, round every corner, after every change, Christ is ready to meet us, to offer us something new.

   The third Advent truth is that when we meet Christ, we never meet him alone. Christ is in heaven and does not leave it when he comes to meet us. Where Christ is, there are Our Lady, the angels and saints. Whether in the Mass where we meet him as a Church, or in our hearts when we meet him in prayer, or when we recognise him as present in every situation, heaven and earth become one.

   We talk about Christ coming to us; but the early Church talked about our ascending into heaven, even as we remain physically on earth.   This is the theme of the Letter to the Hebrews and of the Apocalypse. It is a further paradox that, the more we are united to Christ who is in heaven, the more heaven is present on earth through us.

   Is it not strange that, in the early Church, when the Liturgy was at its most communal, when there was so much emphasis on the Church as the body of Christ, that Christians should have gone into the desert to become hermits? Was it a flight into non- Christian individualism? It may have been for some; but the classical Christian hermit was anything but an individualist. What united him or her to the Christian community was that both he or she and the community believed they were citizens of heaven before they were citizen of this world, precisely because they were members of Christ's risen body. The monk believed that, because of his own weakness, he could not really become what baptism had made him, a citizen of heaven, without entering a monastery or going into the desert.   Did you know that the word "cell", used for a monk's room, was believed to have the same root as "coelum" because, just as the Christian community was raised in the Eucharist to share in the liturgy of heaven, so the monk in his cell was raised up to heaven in his prayer, and his solitude was filled with Our Lady, the angels and saints who prayed with him, and even with all those on earth who are united to Christ in his risen body.  No space on earth was more populated than a hermit's cell! Moreover, people went to visit hermits and monasteries because they believed that, through the monks life of sacrifice and prayer, sacred spaces are formed where heaven and earth are united.

   The fourth Advent truth is that heaven changed radically when Jesus, having died and risen again, ascended into his Father's presence. The Incarnation had brought about a new relationship between God and his creation. When this relationship was perfected by Christ's obedience unto death and became the central reality in heaven by means of Christ's ascension, heaven became the new reality into which the whole human race and the whole of creation were destined to be transformed.   It became the ultimate destiny of all that is. Jesus said that this generation will not pass until all these things shall happen; and in a certain and real sense this is exactly what took place when Christ ascended into heaven. For this reason, the early Christians never changed the texts in which Christ foretold the end of the world. We are in the last days, not, as the Jehovah Witnesses believe, because some world-destroying calamity is about to happen, but because every time we celebrate Mass, every time we pray, every time we meet Christ in the circumstances of the present moment, we are brought into the Father's presence by Christ in the Spirit, and we share directly in heaven which is God's final solution for the whole of creation; and every time we go to Mass or simply pray, Christ, Our Lady, the angels and saints enter our world through and in us.

   Advent is the time when we remember that this life receives its value only in so far as it incarnates God's will revealed to our faith in Christ's presence.  As the gospel today teaches us, we must be awake, ready to receive him and not pass our time in debauchery and drunkenness.   In every situation we must pray, "Come, Lord Jesus," and he will be there.

   In this world of change, we find Christ's will in the present moment. We must not try to re-create a past that is agreeable to us, because God's will is not to be found there. Nor must we seek our fulfilment in an imaginary future, because that is our own creation, not God's. We must find God's will where Christ is, in the present; but we must not be so attached to present circumstances that we try to hold on to them when it is God's will that they be changed.

   We must become Advent Christians for whom everything in this world, past, present and to come, must make way for the Christ who comes. Only our self-will stands in the way.
 

Dom David Bird, OSB (from his blog Monks and Mermaids at http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.fr/

BATTLEFIELD?

Last week we travelled over 500 miles to see Peter Brook’s new production, Battlefield, a brief (70-minute) excerpt from the immense Mahabharata – which last he produced as a 9-hour stage performance 30 years ago. Battlefield is set after a vast battle that left “millions dead” and brought a new king to power after a bitter struggle between two clans. In the aftermath, the new king confronts his predecessor and uncle, his mother, and a variety of other characters that include the god Krishna and the personification of the River Ganges. All is done on a virtually empty stage with four actors and a Japanese virtuoso drummer. The review in Singapore’s  Straits Times gives a good idea of it.

What interested me particularly was the grave fatalism expressed. Man has no choices, but (and) must accept the full weight of responsibility. The new king is told that he will reign virtuously and happily for 36 years, and will then pass on the kingdom to a youth who will be the only survivor of a battle. At the play’s end, 33 years have passed, and the dreadful signs and omens are massing for a new apocalyptic battle – and we learn that the succession will be like the former one, and that there is nothing that can be done about this. Death rules every man; fate rules the life of humanity. Nevertheless, responsibility is all.

It is like a strange related version of existentialism. There, absurdity rules all; yet again one must accept responsibility and act with courage and virtue. The universe is, for the existentialist, nonsensical; for the mournful kings on the corpse-littered battlefield, entirely closed. “This victory is a defeat” says the winner, with infinite sadness.

It brought home to me, in this third week of Advent, the utter astonishment of what we are preparing for. That the closed, ineluctable universe of Fate should be cracked open by God is one thing; that God should decide to do so by entering into human life is another; that He should do so, not in glory or power or cosmic war or starring on CNN but as an anonymous infant in a remote pub’s stable on the East coast of the Mediterranean, cared for by a slip of a girl and a carpenter and visited by a few shepherds; that is completely astounding. Et incarnatus est, de spiritu sancto, ex Maria virgine, et homo factus est. And with that, the terrible cycle of fate, the unyielding melancholy of the kings on the battlefield, is broken. Light floods in. Angels sing.

In paganity, Yuletide celebrates the return of the light; but there will always be a return of the dark. The glass is half full, but half empty also. There is no escape, no opening in the pagan universe. We can celebrate, briefly, but the cycle is unending.

Et homo factus est announces Emmanuel, “God with us”. Not to depart again. It announces the Cross; but the Cross issues in the Resurrection. Death does not rule all. We may celebrate cyclically; but what we celebrate is done. It happened, once and for all, in specific, knowable and known, points of time and space.

Right now, it’s still dark, in every sense of the word. Days are short, horrors happen, hate and foolishness abound. But there is a glimmer of light, and in the distance, very faintly, a sound as of angels rehearsing.