It is a good day to pray for and with our catechumens. And in fact, one of the minor exorcisms in The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults takes Saint Paul’s election, witness, and spirituality as its theme. This prayer would be especially suitable today.

The RCIA has this to say about the minor exorcisms: “They draw the attention of the catechumens to the real nature of the Christian life, the struggle between flesh and spirit, the importance of self-denial for reaching the blessedness of God’s kingdom, and the unending need for God’s help.” (RCIA 90).

Here is the prayer:

God of infinite wisdom, / you chose the apostle Paul / to proclaim your Son to every nation.

We pray that these your servants, / who look forward to baptism, / may follow in the footsteps of Paul / and trust, not in flesh and blood, / but in the call of your grace.

Probe their hearts and purify them, / so that, freed from all deception, / they may never look back / but strive always toward what is to come.

May they count everything as loss / compared with the unsurpassed worth of knowing your Son, / and so gain him as their eternal reward, / for he is Lord for ever and ever.

Amen.

(RCIA 94.J)

TOPIC 3 (Liturgical Year, Medieval):
The Development of the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Thirteenth Century

This topic is a straightforward historical examination of the development of the Feast of Corpus Christi, including (but not exclusively of) the propers of the Mass and Office of the feast, from the alleged visions of Juliana of Mont Cornillon in Liège (1210) to the promulgation of the feast universally in the bull Transiturus of Pope Urban IV (1264).

.
Studies and Sources

Caspers, Charles. “How the Sacrament Left the Church Building: Theophoric Processions as a Constituent of the Feast of Corpus Christi,” 383-403. Christian Feast and Festival, ed. G. Rowhurst and P. Post. Leuven: Peeters, 2001.

Delaissé, L. M. J. “A la recherche des origines de l’Office du Corpus Christi dans les manuscrits liturgiqes.” Scriptorium 4 (1950): 220-239.

Dudley, Martin. “Liturgy and Doctrine: Corpus Christi.” Worship 66 (1992): 417-426.

Gy, P.-M. “L’Office du Corpus Christi et s. Thomas d’Aquin: état d’une recherché.” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 64 (1980): 491-507.

_____. “L’office du Corpus Chrisi et la théologie des accidents eucharistique.” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 66 (1982): 81-86.

Lamberts, Jozef. “The Origin of the Corpus Christi Festival.” Worship 70 (1996): 432-446.

The Life of Juliana of Mont Cornillon, tr. Barbara Newman. Toronto: Peregrina, 1988.

Mitchell, Nathan. Cult and Controversy: The Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass. Collegeville: Liturgical Press/Pueblo, 1990.

Rubin, Miri. “Corpus Christi: Inventing a Feast.” History Today 40 (1990): 15-21.

_____. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, 164-302. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Walters, Barbara R. “Church-Sect Dynamics and the Feast of Corpus Christi.” Sociology of Religion 65 (2004): 285-301.

Walters, Barbara R., Vincent Corrigan and Peter T. Ricketts, The Feast of Corpus Christi. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.

We are now several hours into 2012—
Anno Domini: the year of our Lord 2012;
Anno Salutis: the year of Savlation 2012—
several hours into day of new beginnings,
a day of new opportunities.

Some of us have made resolutions for the coming 366;
(it’s a leap year, you know);
some of us have already broken our New Year’s resolutions;
some of us won’t have the opportunity to see
if they hold for some time yet;
and some of us—perhaps the bravest and wisest of all—
have resolved not to resolve.

In addition to today being the first of the new year,
it is the octave day, the eight day, of the celebration of Christmas.
The octave day of a feast is a privileged day,
and is often kept as a feast day itself.
Following the chronology of today’s gospel [Luke 2:15-21]
some Christians will keep today either as the feast
of the Holy Name of Jesus,
or as the feast of the Circumcision of Jesus,
or as a feast in honor of Mary, under the title Dei Genetrix, Mētēr Theou, Mother of God incarnate.

For Episcopalians, it’s the first: the Holy Name of Jesus.
Eight days past, we celebrated his birth;
the appearance of the Word made flesh:
now he receives the name “given by the angel before he was conceived.”

This naming is a very human moment,
one that will be bound up with his identity,
his history, his narrative, his life’s journey.

It is also a divine moment,
one that binds his identity with that of God.
We call him Jesus in English, by way of the Greek;
they named him Yeshuah,
or possibly Yehoshua,
a name meaning (more or less) “God Saves.”
His name derives in part from The Name—
the one given by God to Moses through the burning bush.
Ehyeh asher Ehyeh:
I AM who am;
I will be with you as who I am.
This child’s name carries within it
the power and promise of the very Name of God.

Certainly, it was a common enough name, in its day;
perhaps some saw the irony in it when he was nailed to the cross
and the placard was hung above his head:
“God Saves”— but apparently not this one (?!?)

With now-familiar words,
the Victorian poet Caroline Noel summarizes for us:

Humbled for a season to receive a [human] name,
From the lips of sinners unto whom he came:
Faithfully he bore it, spotless to the last,
Brought it back victorious when from death he passed.

The name of Jesus, Saint Paul tells us,
God has exalted above every other name, such that
“at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Phil 2:10).

We may not bend the knee every time we invoke it;
perhaps, when we remember, we at least bow our heads.
Invoke it, nonetheless, we do:
in moments of ecstatic joy,
deep grief,
and profound frustration.

Name him, Christians, name him, with love strong as death
And with awe and wonder, and with bated breath!
He is God the Savior, he is Christ the Lord,
Ever to be worshipped, trusted and adored.

Jesus: all that God has promised in the divine name,
all that I AM meant to the people
who waited for him ever so long
has become Emmanuel,
God-with-us,
promise fulfilled in Jesus.

And “Jesus” has become, as Charles Wesley reminds us,

The name that charms our fears,
That bids our sorrows cease:
‘Tis music in the sinner’s ears,
‘Tis life, and health, and peace.

Of course, we have another “name” for him—
the Hebrew title, “Messiah,”
rendered “Christos” in Greek: the Christ,
the anointed one of God.

Almost from the beginning,
his title was treated as a name;
as something of a surname, a last name:
thus we call him “Jesus Christ.”

We heard in the Epistle lesson [Gal 4:4-7]
just a few moments ago, that
“[w]hen the fullness of time had come,
God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law,
in order to redeem those who were under the law,
so that we might receive adoption as children” through him.

And, not unlike those adopted into our own families and communities,
God in Christ has bestowed upon us his name:
We are “Christians,”
those who, like Jesus himself,
have been anointed—quite literally in baptism;
we are christened: Christ-ened,
conformed to his own Sonship,
so that we might be “no longer a slave but a child,
and if a child then also an heir,” co-heirs of everlasting life,
co-heirs of the reign of God,
together with Jesus Christ our Lord.

Do we embrace that name that we have been given?
Have we learned to live every moment in and through that Spirit
by whom we cry out “Abba! Father!”?
Are we signs of the presence and promise;
do we make the Word-made-flesh real for those around us?
Are we living as those who have been “likened to Christ,”
untied to him as members of his body through baptism,
Christ-ened, anointed with his Spirit,
living by the power of the name of Jesus,
waiting with joy and hope,
ready to inherit with him the coming reign of God?

Ah! The stuff of New Years’ resolutions. . . .
and the day is still young—
besides, who ever said that resolutions had to be made right at midnight?

Astrophysicist Richard Conn Henry and applied economist Steve Hanke propose a calendar where each date always falls on the same day of the week. Christmas could always be celebrated on a Sunday, for instance, and Memorial Day Monday could always be on May 28. Their calendar would make it easy to plan annual activities, from holidays to academic schedules to financial calculations.

The pair says their calendar is different from other alternative calendars proposed in the past because it keeps each week at seven days. “All of the major (other calendars) have involved breaking the seven-day cycle of the week, which is not acceptable to many people because it violates the Fourth Commandment about keeping the Sabbath Day,” Henry says. “Our version never breaks that cycle.”

Read CNN on it here, and read the professors’ article here.

The Second Vatican Council declared in Sacrosanctum Concilium that the Catholic Church “does not oppose efforts designed to introduce a perpetual calendar into civil society. But among the various systems which are being suggested to stabilize a perpetual calendar and to introduce it into civil life, the Church has no objection only in the case of those systems which retain and safeguard a seven-day week with Sunday, without the introduction of any days outside the week, so that the succession of weeks may be left intact, unless there is question of the most serious reasons.”

My first reaction to the proposal? I like.

awr

It is by his gift that already we rejoice
at the mystery of his Nativity,
so that he may find us watchful in prayer
and exultant in his praise.

What does ‘already we rejoice’ mean? Surely not that the joy of Christmas has already begun. The shops and streets may be full of decorations and carols, but the Church continues in purple vestments and without flowers, omitting the Gloria from the Mass until liturgical Christmas begins.

The culprit is the Latin verb ‘praevenio,’ the use of which in the Prayer over the Offerings for December 8th (‘prevenient grace’) has already occasioned comment. Ward and Johnson’s book on the Prefaces gives no source for the use of this word here, so presumably we owe the phrase  ‘praevenire gaudentes’ to an author of the 1960s. What was (s)he trying to say? Surely not that Christmas has come early this year, but rather that we find joy in looking forward to it. ‘Praevenio’ here must mean ‘anticipate,’ not in the sense of doing something early, but of looking forward. Since the same Preface occurs in the Ambrosian Missal, it has been translated by Alan Griffiths, who sheds light on the meaning of the Latin:

Now for the feast of his Nativity
Christ fills us with the joy of expectation,
that his coming may find us ready,
eager and waiting with prayer and praise to greet him.

–Msgr. Bruce Harbert is former executive director of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL).

We modern Westerners don’t go in for apocalyptic much these days, perhaps because we are pretty comfortable with the way things are and are not particularly anxious for their overturning. But both the first and second readings present eschatological hope in terms of dramatic, cosmic transformation: mountains being made low, rugged land being made plains, the heavens passing away with a might roar, and the element being dissolved by fire.

The Second Letter of Peter goes on to pose this interesting question: “Since everything is to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be?” (I couldn’t help but notice that the American lectionary omits the question mark in this sentence). Peter provides something of an answer as well: we should be “waiting for and hastening the coming day of God.”

With regard to God’s consummation of history, we both “wait” and “hasten.” Here is the paradox of all of us who live between the times. We are not in charge of history’s consummation. God is. And so our stance within history is one of waiting. But somehow, in ways that are often hidden, our anxious waiting is the means by which we hasten the kingdom. Our waiting is active, not passive. As the book of Revelation says, both the Spirit and the Bride say “Come.”

Perhaps John the Baptist, who appears in today’s Gospel, is the model of this waiting that hastens. John is hardly passive – crying out, calling people to repentance – yet his stance is entirely one of anticipation.  His hope is not grounded in his own efforts, but in “one mightier than I.”

Parents – particularly parents of teenagers – often have the seemingly conflicting desire that their children both be patient with themselves and not try to rush adulthood, and at the same time take charge of their lives and do something. Growing into adulthood takes time, but it also doesn’t happen unless we actively seek to become adults. Otherwise, we remain arrested adolescents. This is perhaps a shadowing image of God’s desires for us: both that we wait patiently for the fulfillment of the Kingdom and at the same time actively work to hasten it.

The new translation of the Missal is perhaps a good occasion for us to exercise the waiting that hastens. We certainly need to try to learn the new responses, to proclaim well the new texts, and – most importantly – to pray in these new words. But we must also be patient; these things take time. The waiting that hastens is not a comfortable place to be, but it is where we live as Christians.

Note that underlined texts are hyperlinked and can be clicked.

The coincidences remind me of the last time I was in the same room as royalty, about 10 years ago. The college in London where I was working at the time received a formal visit from the Chancellor of the University, Her Royal Highness the Princess Anne. I found myself in a corner of the room in company with a colleague, a feisty feminist from these United States. We both had to be there, because it was a command performance for the faculty; I at least was in fact sneakingly curious about what the princess looked like in the flesh. But neither of us wanted to have to talk to the august royal personage. In my case, this was because of an unease with polite conversation about nothing, of the kind that is expected when you meet the royal family. But my friend and colleague was far more forthright and definite: ‘Americans curtsey to no-one,’ she roundly declared.

‘Americans curtsey to no-one.’ If we celebrate this feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King here in the US, we need to recognise that so much of what is valuable and precious in this country arises from a rejection of the idea of kingship, a recognition that the political power of this world can often be dysfunctional and abusive, that human freedom and dignity need to be safeguarded. These United States are founded on a belief that all are created equal. Most US citizens are descended from immigrants who came to this country because the monarchies of Europe could not provide them with a decent living. The Pilgrim Fathers stand as a symbol for millions who came to this land, found here the blessings of prosperity and liberty, and were thereupon moved to give thanks. It’s no coincidence that when I walked into the sacristy this morning I was wished not, ‘happy feast of Christ the King’, but ‘happy Thanksgiving’—and surely, however great our devotion to this Sunday’s feast, preparations for Thanksgiving will be taking up a large part of our energies this weekend.

I am actually a mildly monarchist Englishman, I suspect because all my lived experience is of an unusual monarch who is a woman. Queen Elizabeth’s behaviour has been exemplary over nearly sixty years; in particular, she has never used her position to further her personal interests and preferences, and she has always respected the prerogatives of her duly elected government. Not many monarchs in history have been like her. When the gospels speak of Christ as King—which they don’t very often—they are always concerned to bring out that his kingship is not like that of the great ones of this world who lord it over others. He is not a King before whom we bow and scrape and curtsey. This king is hidden from us; we don’t recognise him. He is in the poor, those in need, the naked, the sick, those in prison. St Paul tells us that Christ is raised on high by his Father, and given the name above all other names, precisely because he emptied himself into the human condition, and then went further, even to death on a cross. It is on Calvary, over the abused, executed, broken body of Jesus that we find the proclamation in Hebrew, Latin and Greek: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

The Gospel is anything but an endorsement of the established political order, anything but a simple affirmation of power as we experience it. The Gospel is about liberation. The title of Christ the King only makes sense if we see it in the context of this world’s powers and authorities being transformed, of a promise that all of us will be given a royal dignity, all of us will be given the exclusive privileges of a first-born son and heir.

Next week, the language of our Mass will change. One difference—perhaps the most striking—will be that metaphors of the Roman imperial court, frequent in the original Latin but downplayed by the first translators, will be restored. I have heard a respected theologian (pick up the video about 2 minutes in) in the last weeks state that it’s right for us, in our dealings with God, to use the formal, stately language of the court, language fit for a king. Now, there are, I think, some reasonable arguments for the impending change in tone: we do need to be reminded that our dealings with God utterly transcend our dealings with each other, and we Anglophone Catholics, we members of a universal Church from the most powerful culture and language group in the world, do need to be taught that we find salvation only in fellowship with people who don’t think and speak as we do. If a more formal liturgical language helps us in these ways, well and good. But our God is one who has no favorites, one who seeks out the lost, on who embraces death so as to rescue us and lead us to eternal life, one who identifies with the least of his sisters and brothers. This God needs to be addressed in the language of closeness, of warmth, of noble simplicity.

Even if we may be gaining in some respects with our new texts, we will be losing what has become familiar to us over some forty years. We will no longer hear expressions that, whatever their shortcomings, have helped many of us recognise the closeness of God to us, the unfailing intimacy of divine kingship and lordship. Our liturgy is about to become more remote in its expression. We must trust in the providence of God that good will somehow come of the change. We are regularly being encouraged to embrace the new translation and make its introduction a moment of growth in our relationship with God. Such calls obviously have their place. But precisely in order for that growth to happen, we may need also to recognise the losses involved, and give ourselves permission to grieve for something that has become dear and precious.

At any rate, the shift in register and tone next week must not weaken our grasp of the central truth about Christ’s kingship: such talk makes sense only because the language of kingship is being used in a quite distinctive, strange, quirky way. This kingship takes the form of Christ’s identifying himself with the poorest among us. The world of the court is evoked, certainly, but only so that it can be subverted.

All that said, we may, if this sort of thing appeals to us, take the image of a European monarch as a means of contemplating who Christ is. The ideal, if not always the reality, provides us with a rich symbol. But the feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King, is rightly understood only when we see that there is also authentic Christianity in those who, at least when it’s a matter of this world’s royalty, have a grounded sense of their own God-given dignity, an evangelical dignity on the basis of which they rightly curtsey to no-one.

I know that some of our readers live in New York, so please do consider coming if you can. It’s free and open to the public.

It will be performed at the historic Church of St. Francis Xavier in New York City on Saturday, December 3, at 7:30, by the Xavier Company, a theater company based in the parish but drawing on performers from a wider area. [See flyer here.]

I’ll be there. So if you do make it, be sure to find me in the audience and say hello. It’s nice to put faces to names! Added bonus: you can see the beautiful renovation they’ve recently completed at Xavier. I haven’t seen it since it was finished, but the early work certainly was fine.

Update: I’ve just learned that someone else will be in the audience whom you might like to meet as well: the composer/playwright himself! A special occasion indeed.