"The mountains and hills will sing praise to God;
all the trees of the forest will clap their hands, for the Lord is coming."
Welcome to my occasional musings on the Advent and Christmas antiphons! Everyone knows the famous and beautiful O-Antiphons from the last week of Advent, but the entire season, as well as that of Christmas, is sprinkled through with these stunning bits of poetry -- sometimes in the Mass, sometimes in the Liturgy of Hours. It's because of them that Advent is my favorite liturgical season. I love the promise of vindication, the invitation to "lift up our heads," and of course I love the nature imagery. Strange, isn't it, that it should be not Lent but Advent, this time of year when nature is shutting down to sleep for a while, that has the most gorgeous nature imagery in its liturgy?
Anyway, these reflections are going to be quite brief (except for today's lengthy introduction!) and will be accompanied by one of my photos that seems to me to illustrate or enhance what I'm saying. The photo for today isn't exactly one of my masterpieces, but it does somehow convey the notion of trees clapping their hands. The Advent nature imagery is full of these elements of creation simply breaking into rejoicing at the thought of the Lord coming to earth. Coming with vindication and coming to free us -- free us from what? Only you yourself can answer that, because the answer is different for each one of us. We each have our own thing that the Lord comes to free us from. And so we can join with the trees in clapping our hands that this is going to happen. When the Lord comes, we can then open our arms to receive him. Later on, one of the trees will open its arms to receive him too -- on Calvary.
