A bitter December cross-wind was biting as I crossed Rue Atwater and hurried through the darkness to 6:30 a.m. Mass at St. Irénée de Lyon.
Inside, the 110-year-old church at the edge of Montreal’s St. Henri neighbourhood was welcomingly warm, but still as dark as outdoors except for a distant blaze of candles massed in the sanctuary. Arriving parishioners were visible only as winter coat shapes illuminated only by pin-light tapers handed out to each of us, and lit neighbour to neighbour.
We were there to celebrate a Rorate Mass, an ancient ecclesial tradition honouring the Blessed Virgin Mary, she who Catholics confess (not worship!) as the Mother of God, and whom the secular world typecasts as that poor young Jewish girl obliged to give birth in a stable because her partner Joseph fumbled the reservations at the inn.
We were marking the Advent of Jesus’s birth, the lead-in to the stable story proper, the largely forgotten cultural groundwork underneath all those lit-up front lawn nativity scenes, and the precursor to the jolly North Pole Coca-Cola man whose commercial transfiguration unleashed an annual Amazonian flood of credit card debt. As a wise someone somewhere said ages ago, we all gotta believe in something.
Alas, this is one of those ages when every belief, or even a specific expression of belief, is cause for disagreement that invariably provokes acid disparagement. Believe it or not, something as seemingly inherently pH neutral as a pre-dawn worship service among those of shared faith can strike the match. For as the Catholic website Aleteia.org puts it with charitable diplomatic economy, the Rorate Mass “is most often celebrated in communities devoted to the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite (aka, the ‘Latin Mass’).”
While that might sound to non-Catholics like absolute zero cause for disputation, within certain Catholic circles, them there are fightin’ words. For although the Rorate is open to parishes that use the post-Vatican II “new order,” or vernacular, liturgy, its name derives from the opening chant Rorate caeli: “Shower, O heavens.”
Trust me on this, if you’re not Catholic—or even if you’re a Catholic like, oh, I don’t know, say, me—you do not want to get into the green eyeshade inside baseball post-conciliar semi-colons of why using Latin versus not using Latin at Mass is probable cause for discord. Suffice to say, it descends to the circle of Hell now known as the politicization of everything. It’s the importation, into the heart of Holy Mother Church, of the political spite words “conservative” and “liberal.”
If you love the Latin Mass for its beauty, its solemnity, its discipline, its caesura of self-denial, you’re a reactionary throwback or, unfortunately according to Pope Francis himself, an unreconstructed nostalgist. If your soul answers best to the common language liturgy that has become the standard for Catholic worship since the 1960s, you’re a progressive devotee of badly played guitar music who wants to put married priests on every altar. All this in the part of your life dedicated to the paramountcy of asking God to forgive your wrongs of omission and commission.
And yet there we all were at Mass for the Advent of Our Lord, honouring His mother, Myriam, wearing our winter coat shapes, sitting in a darkness lit almost entirely by single candles held in individual hands. Until a thing at once amazing and entirely natural—indeed amazing because it was so entirely natural—began to happen. The large circular windows of St. Irénée began to admit the dawn. At first, it was as if the light of day was hovering almost shyly outside, pressing its metaphorical face to the glass, tapping gently and asking to please be let it. Then it was noticeably coexisting alongside the darkness, claiming its place around the supplied light of hands. A woman’s face kitty corner from me became angular planes on one side, soft warm candle glow on the other. Then the people present became… people present. Whole bodies emerged to become forms of the neighbours we are called, by God’s own commandment, to love.
The light of day became the light of the world, and was among us. The prophet Isaiah said such a light would be in the person of a child who would be called Emmanuel: God with us. In that moment, everything else could be overlooked and overcome as mere politics: the shadows of the world traversing and so distracting from the illumination of the world.
It is the moment Christians worldwide perpetually seek, will seek again this Dec. 25, in the story of the stable, in the narrative contours, the absences and presences of a holy family being obliged to wait outside in bitter cold, a bitter wind, until a baby, our Christ, our Messiah, was born.
Merry Christmas to all.
