KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 10 December
How shall this be?
Advent is the season of holy questions that belong to the pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light opening us out to hope, joy, and peace. Nowhere is that concentrated more profoundly than in the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, a service first instituted at King’s College, Cambridge, just after the devastations of the First World War. It spoke to a world in darkness and despair and in the agony of loss. So, too, it speaks to us at King’s-Edgehill in these challenging times. Like Mary’s question, it opens us out to a kind of miracle.
We were unable to have the ‘big’ service of Grades 6 through 11 at Christ Church this year or to be allowed to have congregational singing but we were able to find creative ways to have services for all the School within certain groupings; in short, four services involving a wonderful range of readers, musicians, and servers, and all in the Chapel. While not all together as one, we were nonetheless together in the hearing of the same powerful lessons of Scripture. The service was structured around the great Advent Matin Responsory (arranged by Palestrina, 16th century) and by way of the traditional verses of the Veni Emmanuel which is built around the Great ‘O’ Antiphons. Those antiphons highlight various scriptural names and titles associated with Jesus Christ such as O Emmanuel (God with us), O Sapientia (Wisdom), O Adonai(Lord), O Jesse Virgula (Rod of Jesse), O Clavis Davidica (Key of David), O Oriens (Day-spring or star), and O Rex Gentium (King of the Gentiles). The initial worlds of the antiphons more or less in their reverse order form an acrostic: O Emmanuel, O Rex, O Oriens, O Clavis, O Radix (‘virgula” in the hymn), O Adonai, O Sapientia, forming ERO CRASwhich can be loosely translated as “I will be there tomorrow”, in anticipation of the advent of Christ.