Celebrating the Seasons. Robert Atwell
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her surprise, in the temple amid the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions, and had, on her addressing him, vouchsafed to justify his conduct, we are told, ‘His mother kept all these sayings in her heart.’ And accordingly, at the marriage feast in Cana, her faith anticipated his first miracle, and she said to the servants, ‘Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.’
Thus St Mary is our pattern of faith, both in the reception and in the study of divine truth. She does not think it enough to accept, she dwells upon it; not enough to possess, she uses it; not enough to assent, she develops it; not enough to submit the reason, she reasons upon it; not indeed reasoning first, and believing afterwards, with Zechariah, yet first believing without reasoning, next from love and reverence, reasoning after believing. And thus she symbolises to us, not only the faith of the unlearned, but of the doctors of the Church also, who have to investigate, and weigh, and define, as well as to profess the gospel; to draw the line between truth and heresy; to anticipate or remedy the various aberrations of wrong reason; to combat pride and recklessness with their own arms; and thus to triumph over the sophist and the innovator.
30 December
A Reading from a homily of Basil the Great
God on earth, God among us! No longer the God who gives his law amid flashes of lightning, to the sound of the trumpet on the smoking mountain, within the darkness of a terrifying storm, but the God who speaks gently and with kindness in a human body to his kindred. God in the flesh! It is no longer the God who acts only at particular instants, as in the prophets, but one who completely assumes our human nature and through his flesh, which is that of our race, lifts all humanity up to him.
How, then, you will say, did the light come everywhere, through one sole person? In what manner is the Godhead in the flesh? Like fire in iron: not by moving about, but by spreading itself. The fire, indeed, does not thrust itself toward the iron, but, remaining where it is, it distributes its own strength to it. In doing so, the fire is in no way diminished, but it completely fills the iron to which it spreads. In the same manner, God the Word who ‘dwelt among us’ did not go outside himself; the Word which was ‘made flesh’ underwent no change; heaven was not deprived of him who controlled it and the earth received within itself him who is in heaven.
Look deeply into this mystery. God comes in the flesh in order to destroy the death concealed in flesh. In the same way as remedies and medicines triumph over the factors of corruption when they are assimilated into the body, and in the same way as the darkness which reigns in a house is dispelled by the entry of light, so death, which held human nature in its power, was annihilated by the coming of the Godhead. In the same way as ice, when in water, prevails over the liquid element as long as it is night, and darkness covers everything, but is dissolved when the sun comes up through the warmth of its rays: so death reigned till the coming of Christ; but when the saving grace of God appeared and the sun of justice rose, death was swallowed up in this victory, being unable to endure the dwelling of the true life among us. O the depth of the goodness of God and of his love for all of us!
Let us give glory to God with the shepherds, let us dance in choir with the angels, for ‘this day a Saviour has been born to us, the Messiah and Lord.’ He is the Lord who has appeared to us, not in his divine form in order not to terrify us in our weakness, but in the form of a servant, that he might set free what had been reduced to servitude. Who could be so faint-hearted and so ungrateful as not to rejoice and exult in gladness for what is taking place? This is a festival of all creation.
31 December
A Reading from an oration
by Proclus, Patriarch of Constantinople
What we celebrate today is the pride and glory of womankind, wrought in one who was both mother and virgin. Behold, earth and sea are the Virgin’s escorts: the sea spreads out her waves in calm beneath the ships; the earth conducts the steps of travellers on their way unhindered. So let nature leap for joy; women are honoured! Let all the world dance; virgins receive praise! For where ‘sin increased, grace has abounded yet more’.
Holy Mary has gathered us together in celebration, Mary – the untarnished vessel of virginity, the spiritual paradise of the second Adam, the workshop in which the union of human and divine natures is to be forged, the bridal chamber in which the Word is to be married to human flesh. Behold a living human bush which the fire of divine childbirth did not consume. In Mary we see both handmaid and mother, maiden and heaven, the bridge to humankind. She has become the loom of our salvation and the Holy Spirit is the weaver, a powerful worker who overshadows her from on high. The wool the weaver takes is drawn from the ancient fleece of Adam, the warp the unsullied body of the Virgin, the shuttle the immeasurable grace of him who wove it, and the weft the Word who enters her through her ear.
Who ever saw, who ever heard of the infinite God dwelling in a human womb? Heaven cannot contain God, and yet a womb did not constrict him. He was born of woman, God but not solely God, and man but not solely man. Through this birth what was once the door of sin has been transformed into the gate of salvation. Through ears that disobeyed, the serpent once poured his deadly poison; now through ears that obeyed, the Word has entered to form a living temple. In the former case, Cain emerged as its fruit, the first pupil of sin; but with Mary, it was Christ the redeemer of our race, who has sprouted unsown into life. The merciful God was not repulsed by the labour pains of a woman; for the business in hand was life.
1 January
The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus
A Reading from a treatise On Contemplating God by William of St Thierry
O God, you alone are the Lord. To be ruled by you is for us salvation. For us to serve you is nothing else but to be saved by you!
But how is it that we are saved by you, O Lord, from whom salvation comes and whose blessing is upon your people, if it is not in receiving from you the gift of loving you and being loved by you? That, Lord, is why you willed that the Son of your right hand, the ‘man whom you made so strong for yourself’, should be called Jesus, that is to say, Saviour, ‘for he will save his people from their sins’. There is no other in whom is salvation except him who taught us to love himself when he first loved us, even to death on the cross. By loving us and holding us so dear he stirred us up to love himself, who first had loved us to the end.
You who first loved us did this, precisely this. You first loved us so that we might love you. And that was not because you needed to be loved by us, but because we could not be what you created us to be, except by loving you. Having then ‘in many ways and on various occasions spoken to our fathers by the prophets, now in these last days you have spoken to us in the Son’, your Word, by whom the heavens were established, and all the power of them by the breath of his mouth. For you to speak thus in your Son was an open declaration, a ‘setting in the sun’ as it were, of how much and in what sort of way you loved us, in that you spared not your own Son, but delivered him up for us all. Yes, and he himself loved us and gave himself for us.
This, Lord, is your word to us; this is your all-powerful message: he who, ‘while all things kept silence’ (that is, were in the depths of error), ‘came from the royal throne’, the stern opponent of error and the gentle apostle of love. And everything he did and everything he said on earth, even the insults, the spitting, the buffeting, the cross and the grave, all that was nothing but yourself speaking to us in the Son, appealing to us by your love, and stirring up our love for you.
alternative reading
A Reading from a sermon of Mark Frank
This name ‘which is above every name’ has all things in it, and brings all things with it. It speaks more in five letters than we can do in five thousand words. It speaks more in it than we can speak today: and yet we intend today to speak of nothing else, nothing but Jesus, nothing but Jesus.
Before his birth the angel announced that this child, born of Mary, would be great: ‘he shall be called Son of the Highest, and the Lord God shall give him the throne of his father David.’ The angel thus intimates that this was a name of the