The O Antiphon for December 20th:
O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel; qui aperis, et nemo claudit; claudis, et nemo aperit: veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.
O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel; you open and no one can shut; you shut and no one can open: Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house, those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.
O Come, Thou Key of David, come!
And open wide our Heavenly home!
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery!
Rejoice, rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee O Israel!
The Lord God, Wisdom, Adonai, the Root of Jesse, is the Key of David.
He alone is worthy to unlock.
In the beginning, at the time when our first parents sinned for the first time, the gates of Paradise were locked. This wasn’t a punishment, just a consequence. Our first parents were the ones who chose for them to be locked. There is God who is, Himself, Paradise and every good; and then there is not-God, and if you choose not-God, you choose to turn away from paradise. You lock the door to every good, lean on it, and say you didn’t do it. It wasn’t you. It was the woman that God put with you. It was the serpent that tricked her. The serpent, he had nothing to say, but he crawled on his belly and ate the dust.
That was the beginning of locked doors.
Our first parents looked at the tree and saw and saw a thing they could use– a thing useful for gaining wisdom, useful rather than a gift for which God had taught them a specific kind of reverence, and cursed was the earth because of them. Now they see the whole of Creation as something they can exploit for gain and profit without reverence or love– and now Creation fights back. Now they till the earth and it brings forth thorns to thwart them. Now snakes bite and scorpions sting. Now there is enmity between people and nature– and because of the enmity, there is scarcity, and because of scarcity there is enmity between man and man as well. Now we lock our granaries and our houses for fear of wild animals and thieves. When that is not enough, we gather our dwellings together in one place– not so we could care for one another, as the Lord intended, but so that we can take advantage of scarcity and trade with one another, and then watch each other’s backs so no one steals what we’ve locked away. And even that is not enough. We build a wall around our gatherings, lock the gate and call it a city, and our neighbors do likewise. Cities are in conflict with cities, nations with nations, and the whole world is a world of locked doors.
Our father, Adam, looked at our mother and saw a thing he could use, rather than a person he could love as his own flesh and his equal, and began to lord it over her. From that day, women had cause to be afraid of men, and we still do. Lock your doors, lock the car, get a closet with a good lock inside where you can hide when he’s drunk. This is the world we live in. People have the necessity of hiding their nakedness from one another– their physical nakedness, and their other vulnerabilities as well. Lock up your diary, lock your medicine chest, lock the bedroom door so no one hears you crying, because if they found out how much you are suffering they would ruin you. Lock your feelings deep inside and don’t show any weakness. Weakness can be exploited and from the time of Adam and Eve, exploitation is what people do.
Our mother, Eve, looked at her mysterious gift of motherhood and saw pain.
Pain is the only thing that can result, when children are born into a world where we use instead of love. Those that say “blessed are the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed” are not wrong, not in a world of locked doors.
And who can save us now? We have locked ourselves in, and locked ourselves in, and locked ourselves in, until the whole of human history is a prison. Outside the prison is Paradise, but we cannot get outside. We cannot even get close. We don’t know how. God is paradise and God is love, but we cannot love. We only know how to exploit. Exploitation only leads to more locked doors.
The only thing that can save us is a key.
So, our God has become a key.
Our God has invaded our prison. He has chosen to become a prisoner like us, in order to unlock the endless succession of prison doors and bring anyone who wants it into paradise. He has done this through the womb of Miriam, the new Eve, the new mother of all the Living. Miriam never sinned. She could have chosen to. She had opportunities every day. But, by the grace of God, she chose to love every time she could have chosen to exploit. And the grace of God overshadowed her, with her consent, and took flesh in her womb to become our key.
The time is almost here when he will come forth from the womb of Miriam. He will look at people as people and Creation as Creation, not things to be used; He will heal and pardon, feed and teach and expect no payment. The people who dwell in the world of locked doors will despise him for that. They will sell Him, because that is the only language they understand. They will lock him in chains and drag Him outside the city gate; they will nail Him to a dead tree and leave Him there to die in agony; they will seal him behind a stone door in a dark tomb, and His Blessed Mother will feel the pain of motherhood as no one has before. But through that death and that pain, through that tree and that stone, He will unlock the gates of Paradise and every other door that keeps us prisoner. He will come back through the door of death triumphant. He will bring with Him anyone who chooses to live in a world of love instead of locked doors. Paradise will stand open, as it did in the beginning, before there was such a thing as a lock.
That day is coming soon.
O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel; qui aperis, et nemo claudit; claudis, et nemo aperit: veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.
O come, Thou Key of David, come!
(image via Pixabay)
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