O, Wisdom! You came out of the mouth of the Most High, and reach to the earth’s farthest bounds, mightily and sweetly ordering all things: come and teach us the way of prudence.
That’s right! The great Os begin tonight. In the Episcopal Church calendar they begin tomorrow, but some monastic communities begin tonight and include an O for Mary on December 23. We will follow our St. Helena Breviary and begin tonight.
Each evening the Magnificat is sung with an antiphon before and after. During these days, the antiphon is a “great O,” calling on God to come to us. We hear the various names of the One we wait for. In our churches these antiphons became the hymn “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”; each verse is one of the Os.
Tonight we call on Wisdom, described in the Wisdom of Solomon and the Book of Proverbs. In Proverbs 8 we learn that God created her at the beginning of creation, and she worked with God “like a master worker,” “rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” Wisdom 8:1 we read that “she reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well.”
This feminine figure is one of the faces by which we call on God to be with us. Don’t let Jesus’ physical maleness fool you; he is complete, containing all genders and all divisions. All of us are contained and live in the Wisdom of God.
Feel free to sing along each night. Make up a tune, or chant on a single note. Start tonight. Go!
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