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The incipit of a medieval
copy of the Book of the
Wisdom of Solomon.
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O
Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,
exspectatio
Gentium, et Salvator earum:
veni ad
salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster
hope of the gentiles and their Saviour:
Come to
save us, O Lord our God.
I love these antiphons and look forward to
them each year. In the liturgical
reforms following the Second Vatican Council they are also used as the alleluia
verse at Mass. Some priests adapt them
for the strophes of the penitential rite.
And of course the hymn Veni, Veni Emmanuel (O Come, O Come Emmanuel) is
based on a very close adaptation of these marvelous hymns.
The antiphons themselves go back at least to
the eighth century where it is recorded that they were sung at Vespers both at
Rome and at the Abbey of Fleury in the Loire Valley. This indicates that their usage was
widespread in the western Church pretty early on and some claim that they may
even come from the fifth century. On the
other hand, as there is no trace of them or their influence in the Eastern
Rites, it is not likely that they were much earlier than the fourth century.
The first of the O Antiphons is O Sapientia
O
Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,
attingens
a fine usque ad finem,
fortiter
suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.
O
Wisdom, proceeding from the mouth of the Most High,
Stretching
from one end (of the earth) to the
other,
powerfully
yet gently ordering all things:
Come to
teach us the path of prudence.
This morning
I heard Dr. Richard Land, president of the Ethics Commission of the Southern
Baptist Convention, say that he would prefer to see teachers and school
administrators armed (with guns) in the classroom as a means of preventing the
sort of violence we saw last week at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut. Dr. Land is not a stupid man—he holds a
D.Phil. from Oxford—but obviously neither is he wise. Wisdom and Knowledge are not one and the same
thing, and neither, for that matters, is wisdom and intelligence. Nor, to be honest, is intelligence and
knowledge. Intelligence is a capacity
for knowledge but does not itself fulfill the potential it offers. It is not enough to be intelligent, one still
has to acquire the knowledge. Knowledge, for its part, is something that we
acquire, hopefully to whatever capacity our intellect gives us. Wisdom, on the other hand, is—at least in our
Catholic tradition—an infused gift. It is
something that only God can give.
I would not be inclined to look to the
Southern Baptist tradition for Wisdom—nor for that matter, ethical gravity—as it
is a denomination historically founded on the most base racist principles. The congregations associated with the SBC certainly did not do
themselves gospel-proud during the Civil Rights movement and the SBC
distinguished itself in advocating racism when according the theologian Stanley
Hauerwas it excommunicated Clarence Jordan, one of the most saintly evangelicals
in the history of American religion. Of
course, to be fair, Jordan brought down censure on himself when in his popular telling
of the Gospel story relocated from the first-century Holy Land to the twentieth-century
American South, he has Jesus not crucified but lynched by the Church
leaders. Dr. Land, for his part, has a
history of making comments that if not deliberately racist certainly betray an
ignorance of racial sensitivity. He also
was vocal in his support of George W. Bush’s bringing the nation to war against
Iraq. His comments today on NPR show a
consistency with his views of an America that fits H. Richard Neibuhr’s Christ
of Culture model in which religion sells itself out to support a prevailing socio-economic
and political culture rather than challenge that culture with the Gospel. In other
words, Dr. Land is one of those “let’s make the good news bad news” sort of
people. But then again, as this blog has
pointed out, we have plenty of “Bad-News Christians” in the Catholic Church
too. Calvinists and Jansenists drink
from the same poisoned well.
Let’s give some meditation time to the First
of the O Antiphons
O
Wisdom, proceeding from the mouth of the Most High,
Stretching
from one end (of the earth) to the
other,
powerfully
yet gently ordering all things:
Come to teach
us the path of prudence
And ask Wisdom how best
to order all things in this world of violence and human anguish so that
teachers don’t have to carry guns for children to learn in peace and safety.
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