It’s been a good year for lovers of theological conspiracy theories with Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code.” But every Advent, there is another hidden puzzle that escapes notice, right under people’s noses.
They’re called the “O” Antiphons which are prayed every Advent from about the 7th Century onwards. They form an increasingly urgent plea from a weary world for its redeemer to come. Each day from Dec. 17th to 23rd, beginning with the letter O, we have various titles for the coming Jesus. O Wisdom, Lord, Root of Jesse, Key of David, rising Sun, King, Emmanuel.
In the original Latin, if you read the initial letter of each title backward (Sapientia, Adonai, Radix, Clavis, Oriens, Rex, and Emmanuel), you get ERO CRAS. It literally means an enigmatic “I will be tomorrow.”
But, why tomorrow? Why not today? Why the wait? Sometimes we only understand things when we look backwards. Life is lived forward, but understood backwards. We may only know the full meaning when a prophecy is fulfilled and we look back. It’s the same with our life. In God’s holy flirtation with the world, we don’t fully understand things. Advent has us looking forward to a coming, but it seems that it will be afterwards, when we will fully grasp the rhyme and reason for things.
(Comments to Tom at tomascox@eircom.net )