The Nativity of the Virgin

Giotto’s Birth of the Virgin

Very rarely has today’s feast made much of an impression on me. I did write about it once, three years ago, because I was struck by the convergence of a beautiful dawn with the readings of the day.

God is truly a poet to confound the mathematicians and a mathematician to confound the poets.

Nine months after the solemnity of her Immaculate Conception, celebrated on 8 December, today we celebrate the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a feast so ancient that it is celebrated on the same day in both East and West.

Icon of the Nativity of the Theotokos

If I may be permitted to quote myself,

Scripture tells us very little about the early life of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Tradition tells us that she was born to an elderly couple, Joachim and Anne. They were, it is said, beyond the years of child-bearing, but they prayed and fasted that God would grant their desire for a child.

The Magisterium teaches us that she was conceived without sin, as a special grace to be a fitting mother to the Son.

She is present at her son’s first miracle – in fact like any good mother, she pushes him a little. And then turning to the servers at the wedding at Cana, she tells them “Do whatever He tells you” (John 2:5).

This is Mary’s charge to us, every day. “Do whatever He tells you”.

These days, I am praying the Monastic Breviary. I’m still getting up to speed on how to pray the various levels of feasts.

Quick Side Note on the Ranking of Feasts

They are rather surprisingly ranked differently from the Extraordinary Form calendar, which is a morass of complicated I Class Doubles, II Class Doubles, Greater Doubles, Doubles, Semidoubles, and Simples, each with its own rules on how to pray the Office. It’s a mess.

Rather, the traditional Benedictine calendar more closely resembles the modern, Ordinary Form calendar with its Solemnities, Feasts, Memorials, and Optional Memorials.

In the Benedictine calendar, these are styled Class I, II, III, and IV feasts and Memorials. It’s all actually quite straightforward and elegant.

Today’s feast is a II Class feast, meaning for Lauds you pray the Sunday (“festal”) psalms with antiphons, hymns, and reading proper to the feast.

This morning I was immediately struck by the first of the antiphons:

Nativitas gloriosæ Virginis Mariæ,
ex semine Abrahæ,
ortæ de tribu Iuda,
clara ex stirpe David.

It is the nativity of the glorious Virgin Mary,
sprung from the seed of Abraham,
of the tribe of Juda,
of the renowned family of David.

Mary is carefully located in her time and place. She is the heir and culmination of the line which descends from Abraham through David and now culminates in her.

What immediately leapt to mind was that she is the culmination of not just Abraham, but the prophets, and not just David, but the kings.

Subsequent antiphons of course speak of her relation to her son, and asks her to intercede before Him.

This casts the reading, from the Book of the Wisdom of Sirach (a.k.a. Ecclesiasticus) in an entirely different light than I would have imagined.

The passage is an excerpt from Wisdom’s praise of herself, a literary genre reaching clear back to ancient Egypt, and usually interpreted as a meditation on the Holy Spirit.

Ab initio et ante sæcula creata sum,
et usque ad futurum sæculum non desinam:
et in habitatione sancta coram ipso ministravi.

From the beginning and before the world was I created,
and unto the world to come I shall not cease to be,
and in the holy dwelling place I have ministered before Him.

(Ecclus. 24:14 – in more modern translations, this is Sirach 24:9-10)

In the context of Mary’s nativity, it instead becomes a teaching on the Virgin Mary: conceived without sin, assumed into Heaven, and eternally interceding for us to the Son.

Well played, monks. Well played indeed.

Impart to your servants, we pray, O Lord,
the gift of heavenly grace,
that the feast of the Nativity
of the Blessed Virgin
may bring deeper peace to those for whom
the birth of her Son was the dawning of salvation.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Amen.