Tuesday, December 19 - O Radix (Root)

The 'O Radix' antiphon reads thus:

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

Malcolm Guite's sonnet focuses in on the image of the root with these lines:

All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,
rose from a root invisible to all.
We knew the virtues once of every weed,
But, severed from the roots of ritual,
We surf the surface of a wide-screen world
And find no virtue in the virtual.

Guite writes that he finds it "particularly ironic that we have chosen the word 'virtual' to describe the apparently amoral and essentially unreal free-play of cyberspace, where people can be constantly tempted to explore and make a display of their vices." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 75)  This is the sense of the phrase, 'virtual reality'.  It looks like reality and feels like reality, but ultimately isn't.  The trees, people, speech, and interaction of the online world may not be real, but they are virtually real.  They are simulated.  It is ironic to Guite because the deepest meaning of the word 'virtue' means 'intrinsic strength or power'.  It is intrinsic goodness, in the sense that all of creation is proclaimed good by God in the beginning: night, day, stars, birds, fish, trees, fruit, man, woman, the Sabbath. And this intrinsic goodness, the real virtue of the created world, is precisely what our 'virtual' devices preclude.  The tree on my shallow, thin, ever-thinner device, my 'wide-screen world' conveys nothing of the heft, feel, life-giving, fruit-bearing, nest-supporting, little child weight-bearing power of a real tree in the real world.  This is what Guite alludes to when he says "we find no virtue in the virtual."

'O Radix' then gives us a chance to see that Christ is the root not only of trees, seeds, people, stars, and more, but also the root of these devices we carry in our pockets.  He is the virtue that undergirds even the virtual.  He is more real than they are.  At Christmas, many have the tradition of keeping a Jesse tree, which traces Jesus to his ancestor Jesse, the father of David.  This antiphon reminds us that Jesus, though the seed of Jesse, is also the root of Jesse.  He is the root of all.

We might also remind ourselves of the way the Apostle John begins his gospel: "In the beginning was the Word."  He deliberately echoes the beginning of Genesis, conveying to us that there was a relationship between Father and Son prior to every act of creation.  Knowing Jesus as Lord and Savior, we enter into that eternally satisfying relationship which the Son has always had with the Father.  God being restored to us, the world is restored to us as well because we see that it is his.  Knowing Jesus at the center of our lives, at the root of our lives, helps us to live wisely.