The coming of Christ our Lord is an end and a beginning: an end to the world of waiting, of the promise that is to be fulfilled; a beginning of the world of the new creation that springs from his birth in human flesh.

It is at Vespers, at the evening prayer of the Church, that his coming is solemnly commemorated on the seven days before Christmas. Each evening he is named and praised and invoked in the Magnificat antiphon, gracing the words of his Mother, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord; my spirit has found joy in God, who is my Saviour’.

O Sapientia. The first evening names our Lord as Wisdom, ‘coming forth from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from one end to another, ordering all things mightily and with sweetness: come to teach us the way of prudence. The pattern for each of the seven antiphons is the same: the naming of the Lord who is to come, the expansion of that name and then the supplication.

Christian worship began with the bestowal of a Name. It ends with the adoration of that Name. When the angel Gabriel told the Virgin Mother what her little son should be called he started a devotion that has run like a red thread through all the worship of the Church and seems destined to last while time shall last and till time shall be no more. One surmises if among the things the wondering shepherds and the adoring magi asked was the name by which he should be called, and if the Virgin Mother in her graciousness entrusted to them that high secret which they carried so joyously back with them as they returned to their own fields or their own country by another way. Anyway, eight days after he was born, he was publicly given that Name which is above every name and before which every knee shall bow, of things in heaven and of things on earth and things under the earth.

Through the door of conversion we step out on to the way of perfection opening out before us like a rugged path leading up a steep hillside in some enchanted island. Looking up we see the way as strenuous but of incredible beauty. The brilliant greens of the hillside conceal some soft and smelly quagmires on either side of the path, but from the open door the vision appears stimulating and invigorating. The first view is of the general life of the Church, the island populated by a community all working together, helping each other up the side of the bill, marking out the waterlogged patches, stumbling here and slipping there, but not alone, as many helping hands stretch out to pick up the stumbler. They sing, too, and recite as they work together a common song and a common poem of praise to the Lord on the heighte. There are many choruses. Some of these men and women have cracked and harsh voices; but they all sing as they go. The door has opened into the liturgical life of the Church.

Charles de Foucauld’s silent death at Tamanrasset on December 1st, 1916, was the crowning proof, in a life full of them, of the falsity of that remark of an Arab’s to Ernest Paichari: Oui, vous autres français, vous avez le royaume de la terre; nous, les Maures, nous avons le royaume du ciel. The kingdom of heaven was surely opened to this Frenchman who had lived prepared for such a death; for in one of his notebooks, found after his death, was discovered this sentence, written at the head of the page: Vivre comme si tu devain mourir martyr aujourd’hui.

His life is too well known for it to be recounted once again; but it is useful for many reasons to attempt an estimate of the influence of that life, and to try and fathom to some degree Père Charles’s intentions and motives, to seek, even, an interpretation of that living martyrdom that was his life.

He died to all outward seeming a failure; yet how often is that. the lot of the saints. His diaries, his letters, all record his great desire for some companions to share his solitude.

To understand this term ‘word’ we should note that, as Aristotle teaches, vocal sounds are signs of movements within the soul. In Scripture, of course, it is usual for things signified to be called by the names of the signs, as in 1 Cor. 11: ‘But the rock was Christ’. But it is necessary that what is within our soul and expressed by our spoken word, should itself be called word. Whether the term word belongs first to what is uttered by the voice, or to the concept within the soul, is not immediately relevant. It is none the less clear that what exists within the mind and is expressed by the sound is prior to the word uttered by the voice, since it is its cause. If therefore we wish to know what is the word within the soul, let us see what is meant by what is uttered by the exterior vocal sound.

Our Lady has a prominent place in the mystery of the Incarnation. The time when the Church celebrates this mystery, that is, Christmastide—Advent, Christmas, Epiphany—is a sort of prolonged feast of Mary. No wonder that her place in Christmas carols and especially in Polish ones is outstanding.

The Blessed Trinity: The significance of our Lady can only be fully understood if it is viewed from the most fundamental truth, namely, the Blessed Trinity ‘from whom all things proceed”.

In the Polish carols there is full awareness of this fact:

I believe in one God in heaven
The Father who created this world for himself
And in Jesus his Son,
In all things equal to the Father
Our Lord.
He desiring to save our human race
From the high heaven descended on earth
And was conceived of the Holy Ghost
Is born among beasts
From the maiden Mary…

This carol, which seems to be the Creed specially arranged for Christmastide, gives the proper setting for the whole problem. It introduces the right order. But it does not exhaust all the ways in which this truth is presented.