Hodie Revisited
O Lover,
In last week’s post pondering Your presence decades ago in the hearing of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Hodie Christus natus Est I failed to accentuate a theme which has since refused to go quietly. That motif, short-handed by the word Hodie (“this day” or “today” [Lk 2:11]), might be dubbed specificity or particularity.
For example, the birth narrative in Luke’s gospel upon which Vaughan Williams builds noticeably displays specificity, most obviously in regard to chrónos: the Annunciation is thrice dated in terms of Elizabeth’s pregnancy (Lk 1:26, 36, 56), and Jesus’s birth is correlated with several documentable events in the Roman empire (2:1, 2). Luke also shapes the story with specificity of space: Nazareth (1:26; 2:4 & 39); the Judean “hill country” (1:39); Bethlehem (2:4 & 8); Jerusalem (2:22). What the angels rhapsodized in the shepherds field was not merely a timeless certitude, an aura, an apparition, a mood. In the word of the shepherds, something “happened” (2:15), something vastly more substantial than merely ephemeral, something of indescribable consequence resulting in history being cleaved between “before” and ”after.” In short, Your onset (continuation?) of embodiment had happened not merely generally but particularly and specifically: Hodie (“this day,” “today”). Now! Here!
I do not pretend to know what exactly transpired in the Incarnation event. That the arguably first gospel (Mark) was written more than a generation after the events described, an interval during which the church was born and each of the four evangelists was engaged in the intervening oral traditions involving differing geographies, audiences and theologies, is a warning lest we presume these accounts to be photograph-like. That the Pauline material repeatedly employs an enigmatic word like Mystérium reminds us that what we have here is more “witness” (martyría) and “proclamation” than empirical data. Thus I do not pine for the unearthing of 1st Century scratchings on clay or papyrus disclosing what really happened. But what is equally clear is that rather than ghosts or auras, etherealities or holograms, Your Natal Master Stroke event is presented as freshly declaring Your concrete Self-infusion into every nook and cranny of of the cosmos You are continuing to love into being.
But the particularity/universal plot further thickens into an astonishing dialectic, a riveting reciprocity, between the two dynamics. The four gospels’ specificity of time and space, to say nothing of engagement via each of the senses (Jn 1:14 & I Jn 1:1), is shown in said “happening” to be in service to none other than You who are beyond all specificity, depiction, characterization, or name. It is as if, on the one hand, the Bethlehem particular was the pinhole into You as undepictable Mystérium, and, on the other, ineffable You via that aperture forever and ubiquitously Self-disclosing, Your Totality’s delicious entanglement the result. The Incarnation is Hodie in antiphonal embrace with “eternity,” “here” with both “everywhere” and ”nowhere,” each in reciprocal service of the Christic Summit of Your Story. Particularity wed to universality: ah, what unrivaled a happening! what splendiferous an impossibility! Yes, O Lover, what Divine Madness!
The bottom line for each of us? Every moment is Your and our “now,” every place Your and our “here.”
