The four Sundays of Advent have led to the 12 days of Christmas. Those who are confused by a worldly culture will not have kept Advent, and their carols will stop on Christmas Day instead of beginning. The seven days right before Christmas have had special verses, or ‘Antiphons’ sung at Vespers, each anticipating the Incarnate Lord under a different title. The number seven permeates and structures the physical and moral order, beginning with the days of creation itself. It has struck me how the Advent Antiphons parallel the rainbow colors of the spectrum, emanating from pure light in ascending sequence:

• Sapientia (Wisdom) = violet
• Adonai (Lord) = indigo
• Radix Jesse (Root) = blue
• Clavis (Key) = green
• Oriens (Dawn) = yellow
• Rex (King) = orange
• Emmanuel (God with Us) = red

One could make fanciful interpretations of the symmetry, but what matters is that there is a symmetry and that the colors emanate from the original pure light. Christ is the Light of the World. The Christmas proclamation is, “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

All holiday clichés crumble before the connection between this familiar scene of the stable in Bethlehem and St. John’s mystical vision of heaven where the baby worshipped by shepherds is the Lamb enthroned in glory:

And he that was sitting like in appearance to a stone of jasper and a sardius, and a rainbow round the throne like in appearance to an emerald. (Rev. 4:3)

In the birth of Christ, there is no collision between time and eternity: There is a harmony which is sung by shepherds and angels, and all earthly hues turn toward their source who is the Light of the World.

The first letters of those Antiphons in reversed order form an acrostic: ero cras = “Tomorrow I shall be.” This year [2006], as the Vigil of Christmas is on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, we might say that tomorrow is today. This cause of joy challenges all halfway attempts at happiness. So if Christmas occasions wistfulness and even touches of sadness, that is because joy in a sense teases the limitations of human happiness, just as attempts at happiness without God burlesque true joy. There are many causes of sadness in a broken world, but to wallow in them is to be blind to Christ who has come “that your joy might be full” (John 15:11). St. Thomas Aquinas said, “Sadness, as an evil or vice, is caused by disordered love for oneself … which is the general root of all vices.” The Christmas spirit does not depend on “feeling like Christmas” because it bursts from the Holy Spirit, who is a fact and not a feeling:

Eye hath not seen nor ear heard nor has the heart conceived what joys God has prepared for those who love him. (1 Cor. 2:9)