O Magnum Mysterium

In the glitz and the lights and the noise, it’s easy to think the light is the point. But the light illumines the darkest time of year.

Dec 22, 2022

Read time: about 7 minutes. This week: The unlikely and the beautiful illumine the darkest time of year. We should take note. Next week: I might take it off. I might send out some “catch-up” links, if they’re easy to package in a post.

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For several years, I’ve sent out a short email greeting to a few colleagues and friends. The message has nearly always hovered around a certain text — “O Magnum Mysterium” — that I think has a special meaning in the season. One year, the message went unsent in part because I felt that I had repeated myself too much, and that my cherished friends might have found it boring, year after year, to get the same text and my little homily.

But two of my friends noted the lapse, and asked for the message to return.

Below the image in today’s post is the 2018 version that went out the day after Winter Solstice, the year’s longest night, just before Christmas Eve.

Even though the piece that I consider is quite religious — it’s medieval, probably, though no one knows its author or origin, it appeals to me because it emphasizes the unlikely and the humble and thus contrasts with the glitz and bright lights of modern holiday messages. That unlikely quality and its great and shocking surprise have been sanded out of modern remembrances and rituals, and probably not only among Christians.

Falling as it does near the Winter Solstice, Christmas shares a rich space for remembrance and story-telling about the shortest day and longest night and, probably more importantly, the lengthening days going forward into new life of coming spring.

One night this week, I ventured into Durham to have an end-of-semester drink with friends. We ended our little celebration a bit before seven o’clock, when one of my friends — probably my best friend — had to run home to celebrate the third night of Hanukkah. Before we parted, we chatted a bit about the lighting of the candles, and I thought, “Here, again, light and unlikelihood come together.” The Festival of Lights recalls a fearful time, when a lamp lit in a reconsecration of a temple had but one day’s olive oil for fuel. And yet, in all of its improbability, the lamp burned for eight days, long enough for consecrated oil to be pressed and made ready. Today’s celebration emphasizes that unlikely event, for with each evening of Hanukkah, the light from the menorah becomes brighter as more candles burn. Anyone who’s eaten a latke knows that oil is plentiful; together we ingest that miracle amid miraculous light.

The turn of the light at Winter Solstice is a time of general human celebration and reverence, not just for Christian faithful.

Of course, my readers in the Antipodes have their longest day and shortest night when Winter is deepest in the northern hemisphere. So, their celebrations of the turn from winter happen when those of in the north are warmest and brightest. That fact makes me wonder how the European traditions of Christmas might have re-rooted in, say, Australia or in equatorial places.

So, reader, I send wishes to you of warmth and hope on the shortest day and darkest night of year. However you celebrate and no matter your faith, I hope you are strengthened by stories of hope and unlikely mystery. We all need those stories.

I love the composition that Giotto devised: donkey and cow are closest to baby Jesus, Mary gazes at her child, Joseph perhaps despondently contemplates the situation in the bottom left corner. Opposite him, sheep attend to the stable. Giotto. *Nativity, Lower Basilica of San Francesco (1310s)*. 1310s. Archive of Lower Basilica of San Francesco. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giotto,_Lower_Church_Assisi,_Nativity_01.jpg. Rights: Public domain.

Yesterday, the sun decided it had gone south far enough and began to wander north again. I know of one nice restaurant in a much colder clime where last night people raised their glasses to begin a feast in celebration. And, of course, it was the day when I’ve often sent my solstice message to a small group of dear friends.

I struggled a bit to find a pathway for this note. Last year, I’d impersonated Julius I, the pope who designated December 25 as Christmas. That, of course, was satisfying, and I think I have a greater appreciation for what made him tick. And I did get to “O Magnum Mysterium” as usual — the Christmas re-run from Mark that I hope remains as fresh and surprising to you as it does to me.

This year, I invite you into the inn (yes, That One Where There Is No Room). It’s warm in here if a little crowded, unlike out back by the stable.

We’d have stayed in the inn, you know. We, the affluent, the fussy, and the organized. And I can imagine that we’d probably be a bit festive, since after all everyone had to come back to be part of the census and so there would be reunions of old friends.

Yet as I think of this, I clearly see the gap between inn and stable — I wonder: do the inn-dwellers matter in this story? That is, do we count in the history that unfolds — we, the affluent, the fussy, and the organized? There is a little family out back, and they sure weren’t fussy. They shelter with the barnyard creatures among their noise and smells. But that seems to be where the action is, though I doubt we notice in the inn. Paradoxically, that’s where history got its shape.

We inn-dwellers are the ones who later draped the season in red and green velvet and put the ermine at the edge of red coats. We invented glitter and tinsel. Some of it was to reflect how we, too, could cherish and revere the stable and the feed-trough “cradle.” But some of it — maybe even a lot of it today — covers the humility, the baseness, and the, er, disagreeable quality of the place where a king was said to have been born.

If we’re not careful, our ornaments hide too much. And I guess that brings me to sung Latin and the old song that has been present for most of the years that I’ve sent this message to my small circle of cherished friends. I think that the few words about privileged animals can rusticate us to a clearer understanding. There is a mystery here, and thanks to that mystery the message reaches even to the door of the inn.

Humility and incarnation: these words fit into my thinking about the season. And those words echo when I think of my favorite chant of the holiday:

O magnum mysterium,
et admirabile sacramentum,
ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,
jacentem in praesepio!

[O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the new-born Lord,
lying in a manger!]

In the glitz and the lights and the noise of how we celebrate Christmas, it’s easy to think the light is the point. But the light illumines the darkest time of year. In uncertainty and cold, some paradoxical — and mysterious — hope creeps unexpectedly.

I know from experience that it is barely warm in a stable this time of year. A manger is a feed trough, converted here to a crib by a cold dad, probably because it was the only thing on hand to serve. And maybe he was doubtful in many ways: About his prospects as a father. And, yes, about his fatherhood just generally in this weird circumstance. What this whole quizzical, impossible thing was supposed to mean? And Mom, too, worried: Does this have a future, she thought. Lord, I’m tired and sore. Can this work? Oh, shit, we have this baby. Look where this little life is starting out!

Those things they thought and maybe talked about in the smell of a barn warmed by furry creatures — all of them homely beings, not greatly unlike us in many respects (if we’re honest), even though we will sleep in the inn.

Yes, it does turn out all right, and better than could be thought or imagined.

Have a warm and joyous Christmas, all of you. It is a paradoxical and delicious story, even if for many the story is not a matter of faith. It can be instructive and rich.

(Winter Solstice has gone by, and Orion rises at night now to watch me with my dogs.)

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