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O Oriens, O Dawn

O Oriens, O Dawn

Last updated on: December 23, 2024 at 1:55 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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O Oriens, O Dawn 2024-12-23T13:55:32-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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dawn seen through gray clouds, with yellow and orange light

image via pixaby

The winter solstice dawned bright and cold.

I woke up on the darkest day of the year, to the sparkling of snow on the ground and the sidewalk puddles frozen over. I’d wanted to drive out to the waterfall to see if there were any icicles, but I was so tired, I stayed home. Adrienne was done with school until January. We watched silly Christmas movies and chatted while we cleaned up my room.

The second darkest day of the year was colder, and brighter. I’m told there were really only three more seconds of daylight, but the short-lived daylight was so brilliant it dazzled me, as if Somebody was trying to put a fifteen-hour summer day’s worth of light into a nine-hour vessel.

We ended up going to Sunday Mass in the evening. I like the parish we went to. The pastor is friendly. The music is beautiful. This evening, they were having a Mass with quite a lot of Gregorian Chant, which I do love. But something about the liturgy tickled my religious trauma, and I found myself shuddering.

I went outside to pray on the church porch.

The sun was setting far to the left of me, out over the Midwest where I grew up. Bright colors were stacked in neat layers like the shale in the cliffs to the east, down by the river: Black, indigo, sienna, gold, viridian. Sometimes those shale cliffs buckle and send a rockslide onto Route Seven or Route Two. If the sky buckled just then, and sent a rockslide into the Ohio Valley, we’d become a bowl of bright orange light.

At Franciscan University, during the annual Household Life Mass, the leaders of the “Faith Households” would parade into the congregation carrying felt banners, and singing “Lift high the banners of God, Alleluia! Sound the trumpets of war! Christ has gotten us the victory, Alleluia! Jericho must fall!” and we’d all raise our hands and feel the spirit. Not the Holy Spirit, it turns out, but some spirit that was fun to feel. The thought of the colorful sunset tumbling down like the walls of Jericho to demolish Mike Scanlan‘s personality cult and flood the surrounding land with a solid avalanche of orange light, didn’t feel bad.

The outdoor statue of the Virgin Mary was between me and the sunset, arms out to bless somebody: not me, as I was facing west and she was facing north. I shuddered again, wishing I didn’t always feel so despised by her. Wishing that the people who have destroyed me and so many others didn’t so often destroy in her name. Wishing she would give me a sign that she’s with me and not with the others. That when she reared up one foot to stomp the serpent, it wouldn’t be me under her heel, but somebody else.

I wished, for the millionth time, that I weren’t caught in this bizarre limbo. That I could either be an atheist or even an anti-theist on the one hand, or a fervent believer who closed my eyes to the ugliness of the Church on the other. But I am trapped being me. I believe. I love Jesus. I’m willing to mend fences with the Communion of Saints for Jesus’s sake. I am eager to learn what Jesus actually wants of me, now that I know the Charismatic Renewal was only a network of destructive cults. Part of the mystery of what He wants seems to be here in the Catholic Church, but I can never again believe that the Church is a spotless Bride or a loving Mother. The Church is an abusive mess and she is not to be trusted. That hurts.

I looked up again at that sunset, dimmer, with more green and less yellow. The stars were beginning to come out just above it.

I have often thought it wonderful that at the winter solstice, when people of all faiths all over the year are observing the darkest and coldest night before the day begins to creep back, the Church’s antiphon begins “O Oriens,” O Dawn.

Eons ago, before the creation of the world, before the sun and moon or any stars came to be, the Lord said, “Let there be light,” and there was light, and the light was good. I don’t know what the light revealed, because there were no created things to look at, but the light itself was good. Later, material objects were created to contain physical light, and they were good as well. But the problem with material objects is that they don’t last. They are born, and they change, and they die. A star begins as a molecular cloud that gets thicker and denser until the gravity at the center is such that it starts to burn, and then it bursts into light. The star remains a giver of light for a trillion years or so, going from bright white to yellow to smoldering red like a sunset, and then it dies. While it burns, you see it leading westward and follow, to bring your gift to Christ. But then it’s gone, and you’re left in the dark.

The original light before the universe began wasn’t like that. It remains.

The original light sees justly, and will reveal all somehow.

I went inside after the homily was finished, and tried to pray, and prayed badly.

The hymn at Holy Communion was “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” of course. It was the Latin verses only, sung very slow and solemn. It went so slowly that we never got to the verse about the dawn: “Veni, veni, O Oriens, solare nos adveniens, noctis de pelle nebulas, dirasque mortis tenaebras.” That’s the rhyming version of “O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.” O Dawn, brightness of eternal light and sun of justice, come give light to those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

Night followed evening, and we went home in the dark.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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