Advent – The Long Surprise

I have an accidental ritual that has developed over the last eight or so years. It is a ritual of surprise. Every year on the First Sunday of Advent, as the sun sinks ever southward in the Wisconsin sky, I open up my copy of Volume I of the Liturgy of the Hours, the Church’s public prayer, and I am taken aback in a way that halts my chanting in its tracks. On that Sunday, the Office of Readings begins and goes thru the usual framework of psalms, antiphons, and readings. All this is symbolically and spiritually rich, but completely in keeping with the norms of reciting the Liturgy of the Hours. Then comes the Responsory after the Second Reading (responsories are the short verses that are said as call and response during the liturgy, similar to how the Responsorial Psalm is sung at Mass), and it is a shock to the liturgical system:

Watching from afar, I see the power of God advancing,
and the whole earth enveloped in a cloud.
Go out to meet him, crying:
—Tell us if you are the One who is to reign over the people of Israel.

All peoples of the earth,
all children of men,
—rich and poor alike, go out to meet him crying:

Shepherd of Israel, hear us,
you who lead Joseph’s race like a flock,
—tell us if you are the One.

Throw wide the gates, you princes,
let the King of glory enter,
—who is to reign over the people of Israel.

Watching from afar, I see the power of God advancing,
and the whole earth enveloped in a cloud.
Go out to meet him, crying:
—Tell us if you are the One who is to reign over the people of Israel.

Admittedly, if you’re not familiar with the structure of the Liturgy of the Hours, the surprise might well be lost on you here. That’s because this Responsory breaks out of the rote form of the Liturgy of the Hours. It wants to sing with its own voice and its own rhythms. It heralds a change. Responsories after the First and Second Readings usually have one short verse from Scripture with a short response, then a new short verse followed by the same short response: a-b-c-b. This Advent Responsory is 2.5 times longer, the response is not repeated verbatim except in the last instance, and the whole is a much looser use of Scriptural language than normal. It is a surprise—intended to shake the settled dust off the mind and voice attending to the Church’s round of prayer.

Especially for those of us who recite the Liturgy of the Hours daily (priests, deacons, and religious are canonically required to do so, but all the laity are invited to as well), the repetition of this form of prayer is a constant, a foundation, a comfort, and a poetic hold on the day. Moving thru time, meaning is imbued in days and weeks and years thru the daily, weekly, and yearly rounds of the liturgy. It is punctuated not only thru the Mass but by all these other prayers revolving around it, sculpting our response to the seasons, feasts, and fasts. Advent urges us to renewal and urgent hope for the Messiah’s coming; Christmastide sees the revealing of Christ anew; Ordinary Time sees us working the mysteries of the faith into our workaday lives; Lent challenges us to live radically the faith we’re so fond of adhering to in ways that are comfortable; and the great season of Eastertide insists that we rejoice in the Resurrection promise. These themes are all carried into our days emphatically thru the recitation of the Hours every morning, evening, and in between too if we’re blessed to have the time. The constant repetition pours the liturgy over the objective flow of time like so much maple syrup over breakfast—it’s okay without it, but how much richer and sweeter God “crowns the year” (Ps 65:12) with the hourly and daily reminder of the Hours.

If repetition and fulfilled expectations are a dominant aspect of the Hours that makes them so beautiful, inspiring, and grounding, why delight at the surprise this Responsory jolts me with every year? Because it is a holy surprise, a surprise that shocks me out of the usual and wakes me up to pay attention to God’s action and grace. One thing about surprises is that you need a “usual” before surprise can occur. By investing deeply in repetition and habit, eruptions into that routine are all the more acute, jarring, and revelatory—at least potentially.

It was a holy surprise when Abraham was told that he and his elderly wife would have a child—so much so that Sarah laughed at the Lord. It was a holy surprise when the Lord called a tongue-tied fugitive from a burning bush to set the Lord’s people free. It was a holy surprise when the Lord decided not to strike the Ninevites down—Jonah wasn’t ready for that one at all; how could the Lord not be vengeful and unforgiving?! It was a holy surprise when St. Peter received the vision informing him that, yes, the foods forbidden to his ancestors were no longer to be considered unclean and that the Gentiles would not also have to follow the Mosaic Law to follow the Way. It was a holy surprise when St. Paul saw the piercing light that shattered his malice and reproach against the early Church. It was a holy surprise when Christ told the Apostles that he would have to suffer death and rise again, and that his disciples would eat his body and drink his blood.

It was the greatest holy surprise when this new phase of salvation history began, when Gabriel approached a young woman and told her she would conceive by the Holy Spirit and bear God’s Son. The irruption into the contingent and finite world of the Absolute, the Infinite, shocked the Blessed Virgin, and she inquired of the angel how such a thing should be. But she also accepted the surprise with her incomparable Fiat—Let it be done. In a much-attenuated form, this is the surprise I find every year on the First Sunday of Advent when I reach this Responsory with its odd form and unprecedented length. Such a small thing can jolt us out of our established routines, of response, of judgment, of our ideas about “how things are supposed to be.”

Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. It is a ritual surprise for all Christians to once again be “troubled at what was said” to Mary and to ponder “what sort of greeting this might be.” To remember the promise made to Isaiah, to Ezekiel, to Jeremiah, to Malachi that the Holy One would come to awaken us to his new commandment to love one another. To look ahead again to the ritual celebration of the Incarnation not as a rote exercise in piety but as a timeless celebration of the greatest surprise of all—that, to quote several early Church Fathers, “the Son of God became man, that we might become God.” Like Mary, we can ponder all these things in our hearts, but then we too must once again “Go out to meet him” and “Throw wide the gates” of our hearts to “let the King of glory enter.” Advent is our time to, paradoxically, cultivate this surprise and to ready ourselves for its conclusion at the celebration of the Son’s birth into time for us all.

“Watching from afar, I see the power of God advancing, and the whole earth enveloped in a cloud.” After our initial surprise, the shock of such a meeting, and after conquering our fear and narrowmindedness, our clinging to old routines and prejudices, let’s use that surprise to shake off our complacency. Let’s “Go out to meet him.”