Putting the Poetry Back in Christmas

by Tish Harrison Warren

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/opinion/advent-christmas-poetry.html ( gift link )

esp:

An antiphon is something that is sung antiphonally — a call and response between singers.

The idea was for those seven nights leading up to Christmas, to call on Jesus by all these wonderful titles, “O wisdom,” “O light,” “O key.”

They’re called O Antiphons because they all begin with O, which is exclamatory. It’s evocative. The “O” announces that you are now like a supplicant addressing somebody. So you normally expect a name; you might have said, “O Susan, could you go and get the washing in?” We expect a name, and then what we get is a name, but it’s a name that is itself a poetic aspect of who Christ is.

If you can imagine them in illuminated letters in a breviary, the book that the monks would have had, there had been this great big O. And then they would have done the first word of the title of Christ in a beautiful capital. So it would have said O Sapientia. O Adonai. O Radix. O Clavis. As we would say now, “O Wisdom,” “O Lord,” “O Root,” “O Key,” “O Light,” “O King” and finally on Christmas Eve, “O Emmanuel.”

All these beautiful titles for Jesus in the Antiphons are drawn from the Hebrew scriptures. I think that’s really important. Somebody did an imaginative, poetic reading of the great poetry of the scripture.

When you look at all those capital letters on Christmas Eve, and you look at the capitals reading backward, it actually spells a Latin sentence. It says ERO CRAS, which means “I will come tomorrow.”

If you really want to appreciate the coming, you have to get yourself imaginatively into that place of semidarkness and anticipation. The antiphons do that in spades.

(cf O Antiphons )