Circle of Days: Ninth day of Christmas
Guest Post by Isabel Anders
“Christmas is the day that holds all time together.” — Alexander Smith.
Jörg Zink wrote that “there’s nothing romantic about the Christmas story. If anything, it offers a slice of a brutal world in which a child is born on the street, so to speak, with next to nothing in the way of rights and security, and not even a home.” During these waning days in a year that has brought hardship and tragedy to so many—how can we celebrate a joyful conclusion to Advent’s more inwardly thoughtful days?
So many uncertainties still loom. Will the observance of this twelve-day season, spilling into the new calendar year, turn anything around for us and for the world?
Edith Stein wrote that “the Christian mysteries are an indivisible whole. If we become immersed in one, we are led to all the others. Thus the way from Bethlehem leads inevitably to Golgotha, from the crib to the cross. When the blessed virgin brought the child to the temple, Simeon prophesied that her soul would be pierced by a sword, that this child was set for the fall and the resurrection of many … the fight between light and darkness that already showed itself before the crib.”
I wrote of this paradox in “Cradle and Cross” in Awaiting the Child: An Advent Journal (Cowley, 1987, 2005), quoting a familiar carol:
Sing lullaby! Hush, do not wake the Infant King.
Soon comes the cross, the nails, the piercing.
Then in the grave at last reposing: Sing lullaby!
The nativity is not a complete scene without this element—the cradle overshadowed by the cross—a reminder of the wrenching yet ultimately triumphant scope of Christ’s story.
We began our journey by picking up the familiar threads in Advent and watching how they became woven into expectation. But much awaits us yet as we prepare to travel with Jesus through the Gospel of Mark, examining many supporting passages along the way.
Paula Franck and I wrote our Church Year Primer, Circle of Days, as a companion to the unfolding seasons. In it we treat the texts for each Sunday and selected Holy Days—to help enable this sense of progression toward a heightened experience of the rich biblical narrative.
“Truth, by which the world is held together, has sprung from the earth, in order to be carried in a woman’s arms.” —St Augustine.
