Tag: O Antiphons

Darkness, doubled

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
A lighted candle

I’m still ill. Three weeks, now; in fact, a little more. The really obnoxious symptoms have gone, but if I do just a little too much I find getting out of bed the next day very difficult indeed.

So today I sampled the solstice daylight from the door and then retired, so far as I could, to the sofa. The choir sang O Oriens at Evensong, though I didn’t hear it. Once again, it’s not really how I’d have liked to mark the solstice, but it feels oddly appropriate. And if it feels particularly dark this year – well, it was a new moon yesterday, so maybe it was.

Yesterday we went out to a stately home. There was a choir (OK but not great) singing Christmas carols outside the café, and in the chapel there were volunteers leading any visitors who cared to join in (and most seemed to) in more carols. Yesterday would have been my mother’s birthday. She would have enjoyed nitpicking the choir’s performance, and she always went carol singing on her birthday if she could. I cried, but I was so glad to have done it.

O Oriens. O morning star. O radiant dawn. Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. A whole chunk of morning prayer unexpectedly brightening the evening.

My moon app tells me it’s a waxing crescent, 3% illuminated. Of course it’s not visible in the night time at all, and even if it were, it’s tipping it down out there. Nevertheless, despite all appearances, it might be possible that things are already getting better.

Daily Decoration: O Antiphons calendar

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
Eight purple cards strung across the front of an upright piano. All but one of them has a circle of card with the letter O on it. The right hand most card only has a star painted on it. On the left hand most card the circle has been opened to reveal a second one, whcih has a letter S.

Now we’re getting into the final stretch. Now the O Antiphons come out. Every day from now until the 23rd, one of these invocations frames the Magnificat at Evening Prayer, each of them another way to think of Christ. O Sapientia. O Adonai. O Radix Jesse. O Clavis David. O Oriens. O Rex Gentium. O Emmanuel.

Read backwards, in Latin, the initials spell out ERO CRAS. Tomorrow, I come. My suspicion is that this is just coincidence, but it’s a nice coincidence.

Today is O Sapientia. O Wisdom.

Really, making them into a calendar seemed like the obvious thing to do. This is made of Graze boxes, of which I used to have quite a few before I got fed up with all the plastic. Graze boxes, and a lot of purple paint, and quite a bit of gold paint, and gold gift ribbon, and five wooden beads to slip under the lid of the piano and keep it in place.

Of course, since it works like any other Advent calendar, I could have arranged the whole thing backwards to make the acrostic work out. But that would mean committing to thinking it deliberate, so I’m going to leave it. For the moment, at least.