Thursday, December 21 - O Oriens (Dayspring)

The fifth 'O Antiphon' reads thus:

O Dayspring,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death

Malcolm Guite's sonnet ends with these lines:

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,
Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking.

These lines raise the question of when in our lives we are truly greeted by the light.  The first line suggests a birth.  The sun rises.  A new day is 'born.'  The second line, however, suggests a death, and a great light that occurs afterward.  Which is it?

The first seems chronologically appropriate.  The sun rises in the east and the day is new.  As the sun makes its way across the sky, the day wanes, the light dims, and the sun finally sets.  Guite:

"It is a traditional poetic metaphor, the point of being a cliche, to think of the early morning and first light in the east as analogous to the beginning of our lives, our childhood and youth, of the noon as representing our years of full vigour and strength, and the declining of the sun as representing our waning years.  This is why we have to endure such dreadful names of retirement and nursing homes as Sunset View." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 80)

The first line is right, but then so is the second.  The second line, which also ends the sonnet, seems more spiritually appropriate.  Guite cites 2 Corinthians 4:16: "Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day."  In other words, even though our lives end in the 'night' of death, Christ has accomplished a re-orientation for us, literally a turn toward the east, toward the dawn.  Instead of journeying deeper and deeper into western dusk, we find that in Christ, we are facing an eastern dawn, so that our life not only begins in the dawn, but ends there too:  'Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking.'  After death, comes the light.

Guite shows that C.S. Lewis was aiming at a powerful illustration of this sort in his Narnia book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  In pagan literature, people made magical journeys to blessed isles in the west, whereas in Lewis' book, the voyagers sail eastward toward sunrise until even the water becomes drinkable light, a 'dayspring'. (Guite, 81)  They are dawn treaders.

Today is the winter solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year.  As was mentioned in a previous post, when the world without is dark, and also when the world within is dark, we remember that as Christians, we are 're-oriented' away from the world, away from the flesh, away from the death that comes to us all.  The old hymn is right on when it says, "Oft in sorrow, oft in woe, onward Christians, onward go."  But it is also true to say that every Christian's 'onward' is toward a glorious, ever-renewing dawn.