It can seem that the songs we have to hear in the last days before Christmas get worse every year. Ever more terrible versions of pop “classics” from the 70s and 80s try to revive nostalgia for a new generation, and poor Mariah Carey must regret the moment she covered that Christmas hit. Thankfully we still have some good songs to keep us in the right frame of mind.

Each Advent, the final week before Christmas is marked by some very ancient words. Every day at Vespers (and at Mass before the Gospel) we hear the words of the O Antiphons, or the Great Antiphons, ringing out as if through the mists of time. We also sing their words in the much-loved hymn, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Their very language sounds mysterious and arcane, and they conjure up for us the sense of awe and wonder that we should have at the great mystery of Christmas. Their origins are decidedly ancient. We have evidence of them being sung at the great Benedictine Abbey of Fleury in the ninth century, and the philosopher Boethius quotes from the first of them in the fifth century. They contain titles for Christ, mined from the Old Testament, which point the way to the coming Messiah, and they call upon him to help and save us.

Yesterday we heard the first of them, when we called out to the one who is the “Wisdom of the Most High, ordering all things with strength and gentleness,” and asked him to “come and teach us the way of true knowledge.” Tonight at vespers we will sing, “O Adonai and Ruler of the House of Israel, who gave the law to Moses on Sinai; come and redeem us with outstretched arm.” And so they go on, ever deepening their call, driven by the longing of all peoples for the saving presence of Christ to come into our midst, until the last of them on the 23rd, reaches their completion. On that evening we call, “O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver, the hope of the nations and their Saviour: come and save us, O Lord our God.”

These beautiful antiphons remind us of a truth that the rest of modern Christmas culture can easily forget. This baby we await, this Christ-child, is in fact the deeply longed-for hope of all the ages. Since the fall of man, the coming of this one — The Root of Jesse, the Key of David, the Radiant Dawn — has been expected, and is the one who will bring with him the salvation for which every generation hopes.

And he brings salvation to each of us — in fact he already has. The O Antiphons remind us that Christmas for each of us is the commemoration of the fact that God thinks so much of us, he stepped into our life, took our human nature to himself, so that he could save us and share his divine life with us in return. He is the greatest of gifts and the fulfilment of every promise.

These mysterious antiphons heighten the sense of hope and longing in the last days of Advent. As the final week before Christmas arrives with its last posting dates, online order deadlines, the last shopping Saturday and the inevitable queues at the butcher’s shop, our hope and expectation can sometimes be to have it over and done with! But that’s not quite right. These last days should encourage within us a little more reflection, a bit more soul-searching to see what sort of expectation is in our hearts for the one who saves us. He comes so simply, and so gently into our lives that despite being the awesome fulfilment of the hope of all the ages, if we aren’t careful, we might miss him. All of us need to take a few moments here and there to still wonder, to wonder at the beauty and disarming simplicity of God’s regard for poor sinners like us, that he gets down to our size in order to say, “I love you.”

One cold December night, Bishop Jean Marie Latour spotted an elderly woman crouched in the doorway of his church. She was crying: for the first time in nineteen years, she had managed to escape her captors to visit the church, only to find it locked. The bishop opened the doors for her, and the two prayed together before the statue of Our Lady.

Never had it been permitted him to behold such deep experience of the holy joy of religion as on that pale December night. He was able to feel, kneeling beside her, the preciousness of the things of the altar to her who was without possessions; the tapers, the image of the Virgin, the figures of the saints, the Cross that took away indignity from suffering and made pain and poverty a means of fellowship with Christ. Kneeling beside the much enduring bond-woman, he experienced those holy mysteries as he had done in his young manhood. He seemed able to feel all it meant to her to know that there was a Kind Woman in Heaven, though there were such cruel ones on earth. Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world’s hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman’s tenderness. Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer. Not often, indeed, had Jean Marie Latour come so near to the Fountain of all Pity as in the Lady Chapel that night; the pity that no man born of woman could ever utterly cut himself off from; that was for the murderer on the scaffold, as it was for the dying soldier or the martyr on the rack. The beautiful concept of Mary pierced the priest’s heart like a sword.

— Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

The story may be fictional, but the message is true, and has been experienced by countless many. “The Blessed Virgin is the comforter of the afflicted,” writes Our Cardinal. “We all know how special a mother’s consolation is, and we are allowed to call Mary our Mother from the time that our Lord from the Cross established the relation of mother and son between her and St John.”

Even Christ benefitted from the his Mother’s consolation. As he hung on the cross, he knew that she was the one person who had no part in his being there. His Mother alone was in no way responsible through her own actions for his suffering, thanks to the extraordinary gift of God’s grace that she received from the very first moment of her existence. Mary’s Immaculate Conception enabled her to comfort her Son even in his agony, in a way that no other human being ever could. And she is for us still that “Kind Woman in Heaven”, a fountain of pity, and a consolation to all of us in this vale of tears.

Advent, as we well know, is a season of waiting and anticipation, when the Church invites us to reflect on the mystery of our Lord’s coming — past, present and future. In the writings of St John Henry Newman, our Cardinal, we find some profound insights as to how we are to live this season of anticipation. St John Henry reminds us of the importance of interior preparation. In one of his sermons, he writes: “We are not simply to believe, but to watch; not simply to love, but to watch; not simply to obey, but to watch.” This watchfulness is at the heart of Advent — and it is not a merely passive waiting, but an active, intentional readiness for the coming of the Lord. Newman’s words are a challenge to go beyond the surface, to put away distractions and to prepare our hearts to receive the Lord with purity and devotion. Advent, for our cardinal, is meant to be understood as a call to self-awareness — not to drift through life without a clear sense of purpose, for the Christian has a definite work to do and an important goal in mind. “Respice finem!”

Newman’s life and theology is deeply infused with hope, a truly Advent virtue, which looks forward to the end and fulfilment of things. “Faith tells us of things we do not see, but hope tells us of things that are to come.” Advent is marked by this hopeful longing, not just for the celebration of the Nativity of our Lord at Christmas, but also of the future, when “He shall come again in glory, to judge both the living and the dead.” For Newman, hope is not some wishful thinking: it is rooted in trust in God’s promises and a confident expectation that they will be fulfilled. The Cardinal, clung on to this virtue during the course of his long life; especially during the many trials and difficulties he faced, which he endured in faith with great hope, trusting always that God “knows what he is about.”

At the heart of Advent is the mystery of the Incarnation, the Word becoming flesh and living among us. Our Cardinal contemplated this profound mystery of God’s love for his world, seeing it, the generosity of God towards us, and his humility in becoming one like us. In one Christmas sermon, he reflects on the amazing fact of the Lord’s humility: “And with a wonderful condescension he came, not as before in power, but in weakness, in the form of a servant, in the likeness of that fallen creature whom he purposed to restore.” And in his sermon The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life: “He became as one of his own creatures, as one of ourselves, born of a woman, having flesh and blood, bones and nerves, like ours.” This truth should fill us with awe and gratitude, as much as it did the Church Fathers of the early centuries, as they struggled to present the Catholic Faith coherently, formulating the Creeds, so that Christians could express what they believed with a united voice and heart. The Incarnation continues today, because Jesus Christ is still Emmanuel, “God with us”, here and now, living among us in his Word and in the Sacrament of the Altar. Let us then foster the true Advent spirit, of watching and “waiting in Blessed Hope for the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ”.