December 22, 2021 - Advent week 4

Gustav Dore’s “Celestial Rose” (1868) – “This realm of ancient bliss shone, 

soul on soul, with new and ancient beings, 

and every eye and every love was fixed upon one goal.” 

(Dante, Paradiso 31.25)

O Rex Gentium

O King of the nations, and their desire, the cornerstone making both one:

Come and save the human race, which you fashioned from clay.

 

6 For thus saith the Lord of hosts; Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; 7 And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord of hosts.

                                                                                                                                    Haggai 2:6-7

 

When I was a kid, a favourite Christmas tradition, if you want to call it that, involved eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Sears Christmas Wishbook, followed by many hours of pouring over its contents with excitement. My brother and I were each allowed to “circle” five items that we would then give to our parents as options for Christmas gifts, and by mid November, the Wishbook was usually tattered, torn and marked up like an old textbook. My brother and I could very nearly quote the page numbers of our most desired toys.

 

As an adult, though, and as much as those memories hold a kind of nostalgia, I realize that Sears, and Eaton’s, and Montgomery Ward, and all those other retailers, had mastered the art of generating and sharpening desire in us. In colorful, full-spread glossy pages with exciting tag lines – “Adventures in far away galaxies!” or “Be the first to flip all your chips into Flippapotamus’s lips!” – those companies were able to take the natural human impulse of desire, which serves to help us reach for what we need, and magnify it into a pretty unhealthy longing which far outstripped the value of what they were selling. And worse, while it seemed rather innocent and innocuous at the time, the activity only served to create harmful habits in the soul, habits which are so ubiquitous now that they have gained the well accepted labels of consumerism and materialism. We now desire things which we do not need. In fact, the difference between desire and need has almost been obliterated, and ensuring that we achieve our desires has become the measure of success and happiness in life.

 

This, however, is nothing new. While the advancement of modern technology and the demolition of a wide range of social mores has intensified our desires, in all truth we have been “desiring incorrectly” – sinfully, one might say - for as long as we humans have been conscious beings. Adam and Eve looked upon the forbidden fruit and desired it, rather than God; St. Paul said the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh; St. Augustine lamented the “disordered desires” of his youth; Kierkegaard agonized over the despair that desire creates in a soul that no longer finds the source of its being in its Creator. And for every “freedom” we have claimed in this post-modern, post-Christian culture, we have only shackled ourselves in desire unbounded and unchallenged. In all our desire we have forgotten our Creator.

 

Today, the church sings “Or Rex Gentium”, the sixth of the traditional “O Antiphons” of Advent: O King of the nations, and their desire, the cornerstone making both one: Come and save the human race, which you fashioned from clay. It is a plea to save us from ourselves, and from the desires that we have gotten so wrong. The words are an echo of the prophet Haggai, who longed for the Temple to be rebuilt, and more importantly, the return of God to the temple. One day, he dreamed, God will shake the heavens and the earth with his return, and he will shake the nations too, now appearing as what, or more properly who, they have long desired. I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord of hosts. There is some irony here, and hope. The nations that up until that point desired wealth and power and glory for themselves, will be transformed in God’s return. They will realize that it was God that they wanted all along.

 

The Antiphon, then, captures the real hope of Advent, and ultimately Christmas, that when the Son of God comes incarnate in human flesh, he is coming as the true desire of all people, all nations. All our present desires are only shadows, counterfeit and phoney longings which could never, even if fulfilled in our wildest dreams, satisfy us as our Creator can. Indeed, we were made for Him, and only He can fulfill the longing of our heart, a longing which is the very essence of what it means to bear the image of God. Fashioned from clay, we want our Father, we long for his presence as we once experienced so long ago when we were in the Garden. The desire of the nations is to say, at last, “You are here!”

 

My prayer for us this Advent is that like the nations in Haggai’s prophecy, we would learn to lay aside our fallen, disordered desires, as innocent or justified as they may seem. They are but a pale imitation of the God for whom we long, and will only hinder us, or even enslave us. Indeed, in all our desire is hidden the desire for God. We need only look up to see Him coming, and let our earthly desires be consumed in a holy desire for Him. We’ll be able to join with the heavenly hosts of angelic beings and human souls, whose desire and love swirls around God, as Dante described it, as a heavenly rose whose petals illumine God who is the heart all existence and the object of every gaze.  

 

- Rev. Br. Jason Carroll

 

Click HERE for Br. Jason's musical selection