The different times in the year- ordinary time, Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter- should feel different, different melodies, different colours, as different as the spring is from the summer, and summer from the autumn. Often the modern liturgy does not communicate this.

In our 2019 Calendar we share with you some images of a beautifully illuminated antiphonary from our archives, which was used for Vespers of the Major Feasts through the year, until the liturgy changed after Vatican II. The work of illustration was accomplished by the sisters over many years and completed in 1910.

With the fourth Sunday of Advent, the Lord’s Birth is at hand. With the words of the prophet Micah, the Liturgy invites us to look at Bethlehem, the little town in Judea that witnessed the great event. Unfortunately, in our day, it does not represent an attained and stable peace, but rather a peace sought with effort and hope.

O King whom all the peoples desire
You are the cornerstone which makes all one.
O come and save us whom you made from clay.

What is my desire? Do I really have desire for this King, as today’s ‘O Antiphon’ proclaimed?

‘O King whom all the peoples desire’

The desire for God is part of what we are.

On this the shortest day of the year it is appropriate that our ‘O Antiphon’ has the theme of light bringing us hope that darkness can never overpower Eternal Light.

Recently while reading an article in the National Geographic on ‘Solar Sailing in Space’- which I did not fully understand! – one sentence caught my attention: scientists in the last century have discovered that “light is pure energy – that property in nature that makes things go, run or happen.” These four words ‘light is pure energy’ seemed to jump out of the page and immediately all the references to light in relation to God in the Old and New Testaments flooded my mind. Light is pure energy! What a wonderful image of God!

As today, we pray in our ‘O Antiphon’ – ‘O key of David, come and close the path to misery’ or as another translation expresses it: ‘come and lead the captive free from prison, free those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death’ – we reflect that a key both opens and locks a door. What is it that keeps our hearts and lives imprisoned and locked up? What door needs to be opened to free us to live peacefully and trustfully in the Presence of God in the midst of the daily upsets that can occur and all the noise and turmoil of today’s world?

What do you want from Christmas?

These last days of Advent seem to intend to teach us what to ask of the LORD – maybe in order that we may truly know and understand how to be human; and above all, that our humanity is meant to be one which seeks to serve.

Today we will sing the first of the ‘O Antiphons’; the beautiful Magnificat Antiphons for the final days of preparation for the coming of Christ at Christmas. These Antiphons address Christ by various titles/attributes and beseech him to ‘Come’.

This first Antiphon addresses Christ as ‘Wisdom’. It is a wonderful thing to recognise that Christ is Wisdom and to remember that “the wisdom which comes from above is marked chiefly indeed by its purity, but also by its peacefulness;

The first Reading of Mass is the invitation to joy. The prophet Zephaniah at the end of the seventh century B.C spoke of the city of Jerusalem and its people with the words: ‘’Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem…..! The Lord your God is in your midst.’’

On this Sunday the liturgy presents to us the Gospel passage in which St. Luke prepares the scene on which Jesus is about to enter and begin His public ministry. The Evangelist focuses the spotlight on to John the Baptist,