truth

Blue Monday

This is Blue Monday, the worst day of the year, or so Quietnun informed me straight after Lauds. (She has been reading too much social anthropology recently.) Why should the mere fact of New Year resolutions crumbling to dust, credit card bills plopping through the post box  and the darkness outside seeming never to end have any effect on people’s mood? And why should feeling a bit low be construed as moral failure? Is it all some vast conspiracy to make us feel worse than we do? Aren’t we allowed to be miserable any more?

Personally, I find quite trying the relentless joyfulness of those who wish to assure us that “Jesus loves you” while we’re attempting to deal with some catastrophe or other. It’s true, I agree, but maybe I don’t need to be reminded while I’m struggling to clear the drains or heading towards the bathroom with some malady or other. Anyway, what’s wrong with being tired and tetchy on occasion? Blue Monday is as good an excuse as any to be a little grumpy — just don’t make anyone else as miserable as you are yourself.

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Epiphany 2011

The Three Magi
The Three Magi

Readers of Colophon may remember that we used this image of the Magi for our post about Epiphany last year. The Autun sculptor has captured beautifully both the mystery and the humanity of these three seekers after truth. I particularly love the tender way the angel is wakening one by touching his little finger as the other two lie fast asleep. One can imagine him whispering, “Get up, this is the way!”

Often we resolve problems or come to a deeper appreciation of things by not explicitly attending to them. Sleeping on the problem, going for a walk, playing something on the piano or weeding a flower-bed: all are tried and trusted methods of allowing our minds to break free of the constraints we put upon them when we are trying to work something out.

For the Christian there is another and more effective way of breaking free of these constraints, and that is prayer. Not prayer as instant solution or easy way out, but prayer as quiet, persevering seeking after God. The Magi loved truth and undertook an enormous journey in pursuit of it. They found what they sought where they must least have expected to find it: in a small child born in an obscure part of a Roman province. We often seek truth in odd places and can be disconcerted to discover that it lies much nearer home. May Epiphany reveal to you the wonder of him who is Light from Light, our journey’s goal, Jesus Christ our Lord.

(If you wish to reread the Colophon entry for Epiphany 2010, the best way of doing so is to go via our web site and click on the archive for January 2010. At the moment the JS-Kit comments script is making things work very slowly, so we need to decide whether to  drop the comments, which we are reluctant to do, or find another way of archiving them. We’ll take our own advice and sleep on it.)

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O Sapientia

O Sapientia

Tonight at Vespers we shall begin the wonderful series of Magnificat antiphons known as the Great O Antiphons. You can read more about them and listen to them being sung on the Advent page of our web site, here.

We begin the series with an invocation of Wisdom, which proceeds from the mouth of the Most High, fills the whole universe and holds all things in being. We ask this divine Wisdom, so strong and yet so gentle, to come and show us the way of prudence, the way of divine truthfulness. It is a dangerous prayer to make, because it may be answered with a disturbing literalness. Once we have glimpsed the Truth, we can never be the same again. All our old falsehoods, the “little white lies” we use to protect ourselves, begin to seem unbearably shabby. We stand in need of re-creation; and that is precisely what Advent is about.

These last days of Advent are very precious. If until now you have not been able to make any time for spiritual preparation for Christmas, try to read though the O antiphons each day and the scripture texts we suggest should be read in conjunction with them. It may seem to you very little but God is gracious and immensely pleased with the small things we do for love of him.

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