20 + K + M + B + 07
ON THE 12TH DAY OF CHRISTMAS
MY TRUE LOVE GAVE TO ME
THE GIFT OF HIS REVELATION TO THE GENTILES...
Which is the Start of Roseanne Sullivan's Reverent and Irreverent Account of Her Life in Christ This Past Year
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Heteronymous Bosch, Adoration of the Magi, 1510
Today, Jan. 6, the day after the 12th day of Christmas, is the celebration of the Feast of the Magi, a day overlaid with many names, much history and significance, most of which I have only glimpsed before now. Some of what I recently learned about this and the rest of the Christmas season I hope to share with you, as part of my reflection on this past year. If you stick with me and keep reading this, you'll get to some news of the typical Christmas letter sort, eventually.
The Feast of the Magi is also called the Feast of the Wise Men, Three Kings Day, Epiphany, and the Manifestation of Christ. In the Eastern churches (as was true in ancient times in the whole Church), the feast of the Manifestation of Christ celebrates not only the visit of the Wise Men, but also Jesus' baptism at which a miraculous voice from Heaven said "This is My Beloved Son in whom I am well pleased, " and also the Wedding at Cana, where for the first time Jesus performed a miracle when He changed water into wine. All of these were manifestations of Christ in that they showed who He really is.
The visit of the Magi taken by itself is an indication of Christ's universality. His birth was revealed at first to shepherds in Israel, at a time when the Jewish people were eagerly expecting the Messiah predicted by their prophets. But the Magi story shows us that His coming had also been foretold to seekers for truth in other lands. The Magi read the miraculous Star of Bethlehem as an omen of the coming of a great king and came to worship Him, and so their feast is particularly remembered as Christ's revelation to Gentiles.
Because Christ came also to the Gentiles, we are all included in the salvation promised to Jews as children of Abraham. As Pope Pius XI said in 1938, "Spiritually, we are all Semites."
I might physically also be a Semite, since there is some possibility that I am Jewish on my mother's side, but that's another story.
When Pope Benedict XVI visited the Cologne Cathedral this year, he venerated the relics of the Three Wise Men that are traditionally believed to be there. Tradition also has it that the Three Wise Men wandered through Bavaria, and so this charming custom developed there and spread to other countries: Catholics take chalk that is blessed on either 12th night, Jan. 5, or on the Feast of Epiphany, and they mark the door lintels of their homes with the year, four crosses, and the initials KMB, for the names of the Three Wise Men, Kaspar, Melchior and Balthasar. This is to let the Magi know that they will find Christ and a welcome if they pass by again.
I first was exposed to this tradition when I went to sing Morning Prayer (Lauds) with a few fellow members of the St. Ann choir. I joined the choir this year to sing Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphonic music in Latin. Some of us start our Sundays by meeting informally for Lauds at the home of Stanford Professor of Music, William Mahrt, who directs the choir, and my first time there, I wondered what the 20 + K + M + B + 06 chalked over his door signified. And now I know.
If you don't automatically assume that the Christmas season ends on Christmas Day, you might have the impression that it ends on Jan. 6. But no. For the Roman Catholic Church, the Christmas season officially ends on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Jan.7. Since Jan. 6 falls on a Saturday this year, the Feast of the Magi will be celebrated on Sunday the 7th, pushing the celebration of the Baptism of the Lord from the 7th to the 8th. Talk about moveable feasts! Determining which day actually ends the feast of Christmas gets even a bit more complicated, as I'll explain a bit later.
But first, I have to admit that I am telling you all this partly to convince you that this Christmas letter is not late. I'm still writing it during the Christmas season. As usual, that's my excuse. I'm sticking to it.
Oops, where did four more days go? Today is Jan. 10, four days past the Baptism of the Lord. Thank goodness, Susan Altstatt, artist and fellow St. Ann choir member, told me this morning-after we sang Lauds and before we hurried off to practice for the noon Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto-that the Christmas season traditionally didn't end until forty days after Christmas, Feb. 2. Candlemas, as the feast on Feb. 2 has been called, is a day for blessing the beeswax candles to be used during the rest of the year. So even now this letter is still not late, since it's not Feb. 2 yet!
Today is Jan. 15. After I last wrote, I discovered that the change of the ending of the Christmas season to the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord from Candlemas is one of the liturgical revisions that took place after the Vatican II council in the 60s. There are still some holdouts observing the old date. Poland still celebrates the Christmas season until Feb. 2, as did Pope John Paul II in his private papal apartments. On a more-local level, Susan Altstatt doesn't take her tree down until Feb. 2. I'm sure there are other holdouts too :-).
Apropos of the varied ways to celebrate Christmas, I found this poem from colonial Williamsburg:
When New Year's Day is past and gone;
Christmas is with some people done;
But further some will it extend,
And at Twelfth Day their Christmas end.
Some people stretch it further yet,
At Candlemas they finish it.
The gentry carry it further still
And finish it just when they will;
They drink good wine and eat good cheer
And keep their Christmas all the year.
www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/HTML/Candlemas.htm
You thought the Feast of the Magi was complicated? Try looking at the feast on Feb. 2. Once called Candlemas, and the Feast of the Purification of Our Lady, it's now the Feast of the Presentation of Child Jesus in the Temple.
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Hans Holbein. Presentation of Jesus in the Temple
I can't help thinking that a certain amount of political correctness may be behind why we never hear anything any more about the purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Jewish law said that a woman was unclean for forty days after the birth of a boy and eighty days after a girl and then had to make a sacrifice to be purified. That might sound sexist to some, but it doesn't bother me.
The Presentation in the Temple is yet another Feast of manifestation. When Christ was carried into the Temple 40 days after His birth to be dedicated to God as required by Jewish Law for every firstborn son, He was recognized by a prophet named Simeon and by a prophetess named Anna, who had been waiting for His coming too.
Christmas Day is the end of the commercial "Holiday" celebration, but for us Christians, shouldn't it really be the start? With that in mind, I have started avoiding "Holiday" parties and pre-Christmas treats.
I commemorate Advent as a four week time of penance and anticipation of Christmas, with one Advent wreath on my table and another one on my front door. On the indoor wreath, I follow the custom of lighting one purple candle for each of the first two weeks, then a pink candle for Laetare Sunday, which is the start of the third week of rejoicing that Advent is almost over, and then a final purple candle for the fourth week. My outdoor Advent wreath is a plain evergreen ring on which I hang a purple ornament on each of the first two Sundays, followed by a pink ornament for week three, and a purple ornament for week four. I've always been the only person I knew who decorated an evergreen wreath on the front door for Advent, until I saw a single purple ball on a wreath on Prof. Mahrt's front door the first Sunday of Advent.
The only other decorating I do is to put out evergreens on the hutch and on sills on the front porch and set up a manger scene on the coffee table. When the kids were small, I made the stable from papier mâché and bought unpainted plaster figures that we all painted together. The figure of the divine Baby is hidden away in a drawer, and the Magi and their camels start their journey on a table away from the manager, until it is time for them to enter the scene.
My Christmas celebration began with my singing Vespers (Evening Prayer) for the Vigil of Christmas with a few other members of the St. Ann choir and my son Liberty at Prof. Mahrt's home. Bill not only teaches early music performance at Stanford, but he edits the Sacred Music journal and is president of the Church Music Association of America, so I felt privileged when Bill sat down with Liberty and me on the couch for a few minutes before the other choir members arrived and gave us a briefing on how to sing the Vespers.
This is the third year that Liberty has given me this gift at my request - to attend choir practice and sing with me at Midnight Mass. (The previous two years he sang with me and our neighborhood Holy Cross Church Italian choir.)
At Midnight Mass this year, the choir sang carols followed by a polyphonic Mass Missa O magnum mysterium. On Christmas Day before I left home to sing Lauds followed by a William Lasso Mass for Four Voices with the choir at noon, I put the figure of the Baby Jesus in the stable, put lights on the evergreens and on the living room fichus, and put out a white flowering plant called Star of Jerusalem and a wine-colored poinsettia. Let the Christmas Feasts begin! The day ended with dinner at Susan Altstatt and her husband, John's home, as most Sundays do.
On Epiphany, I moved the magi and the camels to the stable.
During this past year, my horizons continued to expand. I turned 61 on October 3, so at my age one might expect the opposite. But I've been relearning how to sight-read music, learning how to sing Gregorian chant and polyphonic music, retrieving and finally putting to use my long dormant years of Latin study. I learned some Czech, traveled, wrote and published articles and photos, did some well-received graphic design, had adventures, made new friends and acquaintances, and continued my growth as an OCDS (which stands for Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites). In case you might wonder, discalced means shoeless, and it refers to the reformed Carmelite practice of wearing sandals instead of fancy shoes. My mother once had aspired to be a Carmelite cloistered nun, but she left because of a mutual agreement that she needed to find a more active order. After she married my father instead, she became the mother of three daughters and then a widow within three years, talk about finding a more active order!
In May, I made temporary three-year OCDS promises and took the religious name: Rose Anne Therese Teresa Marie, only a slight variation from my baptismal and confirmation names. My mother gave me my middle name Therese after St. Therese of Lisieux, who is called the Little Flower and is a Carmelite Doctor (Teacher) of the Church, but Mummy actually called me Roseanne Teresa, and she told me that I was also named for the other great Carmelite saint, the Big Teresa, the mystic and writer of Avila, reformer of Carmelites and another great woman Doctor of the Church.
On Jan. 22, I walked the Walk for Life in San Francisco along the beautiful Embarcadero and Marina with fellow OCDS members and good friends, Regina and Dave Dittmann. We're going to do again this year. Out of a crowd of 15,000, we literally bumped into another OCDS friend, Jim Fahey, who was bishops' honor guard with other Thomas Aquinas College alumni at the front. We caught up with other OCDS members and with our spiritual advisor, Fr. Christopher LaRocca, towards the end of the walk. One of my photos of the crowd was published in San Francisco Faith newspaper. And you can just make Jim out in a photo (not by me) that made national news.
On Feb. 2, I attended the Eternal World Television Network (ETWN) 25th Anniversary Celebration in San Francisco, with Roland and Marcy Deptuch, who hold a prayer group at their home that I started to attend that month. The celebration cemented my attachment to EWTN, which I believe is a great gift of God to the world. I had started watching EWTN seriously after I returned from Israel in 2005 because Father Joseph Mary, one of the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal World who are associated with EWTN, had traveled with us. He is such an exemplary good pure priest, I wanted to see more of him.
At the EWTN celebration, I found Fr. Joseph hearing confession, where he told me "Jesus is going to give you a gift this weekend." He never said anything like that before! I am not sure, but I think that the gift he spoke about might have been my hearing of Mother Angelica's story. That day, Raymond Arroyo, EWTN news director, regaled the audience in his inimitably charming and entertaining way with stories from his New York Times bestselling autobiography Mother Angelica: A Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles, and the story about how a cloistered nun started the station with no TV experience at the age of 58 struck me. My life, I thought, ain't over yet!
The theme repeatedly stressed that weekend was that God uses dodoes who are too dumb to know that something is impossible. Mother Angelica achieved a lot for being a cloistered nun. Like her, St. Teresa of Avila always comes to my mind when people slander the Church for keeping women down. She was a cloistered nun in Spain in an era when women did not hold much power and when women mystics were viewed with great suspicion. She was even questioned by the Inquisition, but she died calling herself "a daughter of the Church." She successfully created reformed orders of Carmelite nuns and friars and generally shook up her world in spite of the limits of her sex and her times. And as if those achievements weren't enough, she and her fellow Carmelite reformer, St. John of the Cross, are two of the greatest writers of Spain, and their works are classics around the world. When God wants something done, He gives you whatever you need to make it happen.
After the EWTN weekend, I finagled a chance to interview Arroyo on the phone in a two-hour conversation that had me cracking up every time I later tried to transcribe the tape. "Raymond," I said once, "Did anyone ever tell you you're a riot?" "I've started some," he quipped in reply. The article I wrote from that interview appeared in San Francisco Faith.
In April, a Huntsville, Alabama, company, Avocent, bought my Brazilian-owned company, and much uncertainty followed about who would stay and who would go. All of us technical writers were kept on, and in June, we flew to Alabama for training. I took advantage of the chance to visit EWTN in Birmingham and to see the $55 million shrine that Mother Angelica built to the Blessed Sacrament 75 miles away in Hanceville. The shrine is now the state's biggest tourist attraction, surpassing the space center in Huntsville!
Even though Arroyo's show doesn't have a studio audience, I did some more finagling and got in to watch the show as an audience of one. In Sept., us writers flew to AL again, and I caught another 25th anniversary celebration, this one in Birmingham. My favorite souvenir from that trip is a photo of Arroyo and me with him fondly squeezing my hand.
The Avocent-sponsored trips gave me the chance to make some creative flight arrangements too. On the first trip, I added an extra flight leg to Boston on the way, and paid the minimal additional cost so I could visit my aunt and uncle, sisters, nieces, grand nieces and nephews in MA. Liberty flew out separately and we stayed in the Dudley Farm Hostel, an amazing bargain stay at a working farm that is actually a preserve surrounded by encroaching suburbs. I drove from that bucolic environment 15 miles into the city of Worcester every day to visit family. While in MA, I also interviewed Roy Schoeman, author of Salvation is From the Jews. I've spent many hours transcribing the interview and drafting the article, but every time I attempt to finish it, something happens to prevent me, from the tape player not working to my computer going down. Makes me wonder . . ..
On the second Alabama trip I added a leg to Newark on the way back. I then met Liberty at the NWK airport and we drove down to Princeton together to visit with my daughter Lauren after over 2 years. We had a great visit there.
I joined St. Ann choir after Easter. Since there are signs from the Vatican that Latin Gregorian chant is about to be restored to its important place in the worship of the Catholic Church, it's an exciting time to join forces with these dedicated people, some of whom have been preserving and performing this great music for forty years. To prepare for a choir trip to Prague in Sept., I studied all things Czech, including the language, and practiced the choir repertoire for an intense couple of months, then I started for a Prague with great expectations. I had designed a poster to announce the choir's performances that was posted all over Prague, and the choir performed to standing room only crowds at times, but I was not there. I lost my passport in the Munich airport between flights on the way, and my trip ended when I had to return home after a night on an airport bench. A version of the story of my lost trip to Prague appeared in the Santa Clara Weekly, under the title
"Welcome to München Land."
When he saw the choir poster, Jim Fahey told his sister Patricia about it in glowing terms, so she recruited me to design posters, do some work on the website, and help publicize a South Bay Concert series the family launched in December. I was thrilled by the concerts, one by immensely talented fellow-OCDS pianist and composer Patric Nikolas and the other by a beautiful soprano Phoebe Jevtovic. Both were held at gorgeous venues, the first at Le Petit Trianon Theater, the second at Mission San Jose.
Recently Kevin Rossiter, another fellow choir member, loaned me some blessed chalk. Then Liberty humored me by standing on a ladder tonight and marking 20 + K + M + B + 07 on the front door lintel while I said the following prayer I found on the Internet: "May all who come to our house this year rejoice to find Jesus living among us, and may we seek and serve Christ in everyone we meet! Amen." Amen!
See photos of my year at
http://roseannetsullivan.smugmug.com/gallery/2340288.
* Click the slideshow button on upper right. * Check the caption box on the slideshow bar. Links to my articles are at: http://www.geocities.com/roseannesullivan.
More Parting Thoughts: I came across the following apt observations about how Christians really should celebrate Christmas at an atheist website, of all places (http://atheism.about.com/od/ christmasholidayseason/p/SecularChristma.htm):
"Conservative ... Christians complain about people taking the 'Christ' out of Christmas, but they seem to forget that they have already taken the 'Mass' out of Christmas (Mass being a service including Holy Communion). . . . This is just one of many masses that have been excised from the season. . . . So, the next time a Christian insists that we put the Christ back in Christmas, tell them that they should also:
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Put the Mass back in Christmas
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Restore Candlemas
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Restore the Feast of the Epiphany
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Restore the Advent season
- Restore gift-giving to the real Christmas season, which occurs after Christmas day
- Don't put up a Christmas tree until Christmas Eve - if at all
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Use Christmas as a day of contemplating Christ, not for engaging in commerce"
