The fourth antiphon of Advent, 'O Clavis', reads thus:
O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.
Guite connects the image of a key to Christ in two ways. First, through the complexity of a key, and second through the grinding, cutting that makes a key.
First, Guite quotes G.K. Chesterton from his book Orthodoxy as he writes about the Christian creed as necessarily having a strange and complex shape:
"When once one believes in a creed, one is proud of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity of science. It shows how rich it is in discoveries. If it is right at all, it is a compliment to say that it's elaborately right. A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key." (Chesterton, quoted in Guite, Waiting on the Word, 78)
In the sense, Chesterton is inviting us to reflect on the Christian faith as a key and the world we live in with its myriad challenges as a lock. Does the key fit the lock? Does the account of God as triune, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who reveal themselves to one tribe of people on the eventual behalf of the whole world, ultimately writing themselves into the story of the world for the sake of redeeming and renewing human life from the inside out - is it a key that fits anything? One of the aspects of this faith that continues to feel like a key to me is that God himself is a wealth of community. To paraphrase the famous Solzhenitsyn line, the line of individualism runs through every human heart. So much of the good I seek to do is selfish: I want people to love me! But God already has all he needs in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He doesn't need the world. But, he loves the world. And within himself, he suffers on behalf of the world, even to death on a cross. Our individualistic world - my individualistic heart - is exactly the sort of lock that needs a key like this.
Second, Guite recalls the sensory experience of seeing a key being shaped:
"The other, deeper and older memory was of being taken by my mother as a child to see a key being cut; not a little Yale one, but a big, old-fashioned, complex one. I remember the locksmith clamping the blank in the vice beside the key to which it would conform, and then the noise and violence of what followed, the high-pitched scream and whine of the metal cutter - in Seamus Heaney's words, 'the unpredictable fantail of sparks' - and the miracle of the finished thing, still cooling in the hand." (Guite, 78)
The cross shapes Jesus ultimately into the key that fits. Close your eyes! Consider that the Eternal God became a human person with a heart, with hands, feet, eyes, voice, laughter! What sort of heart is that? What sort of eyes does he have when he looks at you, or me, or the world? And that body of inestimable worth, which is the source of you, me, or all that is, all the gifts we wrap, and the paper we wrap it in, was crushed on a cross. Let the sentimentality pass. Let the sense of condemnation pass. Let the distraction pass. Just sit with it. That all the brutal truth and condemnation about each one of us would freely be taken up by him on his own shoulders in loving victory - does that not make your heart sing? Wouldn't you yearn for a physician like this who, the second he diagnoses, cures? Don't you love him? Is this not a key to whatever kind of lock lies hidden in our own souls?
From Guite's sonnet:
I cry out for the key I threw away
That turned and over turned with certain touch
And with the lovely lifting of a latch
Opened my darkness to the light of day.
O come again, come quickly, set me free
Cut to the quick to fit, the master key (Guite 76-77)
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