Sunday, December 17 - O Sapientia (Wisdom)

The first antiphon, 'O Wisdom' draws on two passages from the Apocrypha which praise wisdom.  Some, perhaps many, Protestants will know the Apocrypha as the books that are in Catholic Bibles but not in Protestant ones.  These books largely come from the inter-testamental times, between 400 B.C. and the birth of Christ.  The sense that the Jewish Bible excluded them led the Reformers to do so as well, but these books have fed Christian reflection for centuries.  It was the Bible St. Augustine read.  As Guite writes, "sapientia is part of what John means by the Logos, 'the Word (who) was with God' (John 1:1), the coming Christ."

Here is the antiphon:

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other mightily,
and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence

Here is the conclusion of Malcolm Guite's sonnet:

Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring,
Come to me now, disguised as everything.

Guite writes about composing the sonnet:

"Writing the poem led me in the end to a strange paradox.  The psalmist is taunted by the question, 'Where is now your God?'  And it's a question that some more militant 'scientific' atheists of our own day still use to taunt Christians.  And in one sense we cannot directly point to God because 'Sapientia, this underlying coherence and beauty, is not to be found anywhere as an item in the cosmos; it is not a single being, but the ground of being itself - not a single beauty but the source of all beauty.  And yet, for the very same reason, there is a real sense in which we can point to everything, 'from one end to the other' of the cosmos, and say, 'There, can't you see?'  For wisdom is both hidden and gloriously apparent." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 69)

In this regard, consider what Paul says in Colossians 1:15-20:

"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.  For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross."

Christ is the ordering power for all the symmetry, patterns, rhythm, music, mathematical precision that we find on this earth and even beyond, such as astronomical orbits.  All things, all people, are made by Christ for Christ.  To this end, where we find resistance to Christ within the creation, we trust that the creation itself is not alien to Christ.  It is his own.  As Dallas Willard writes in his book The Divine Conspiracy, we find in Jesus a mastery, a brilliance, an innate understanding of all things.  This is some of what we can call to mind to consider that he is Wisdom.