DOMINICA IV ADVENTUS
20 DECEMBER 2015
RORATE CÆLI
DROP DOWN DEW, YE HEAVENS from above
and the clouds bestow the gentle rain of righteousness:
let the earth reveal and bring forth the Saviour.
It did not happen with august fanfare, nor with fear and trembling. In the days prior, there was no warning, no excitement, no expectation that the world would be forever changed. There were no crowds thronging the streets, no jubilee impatiently waiting to begin. God came among us with the softness of the dewfall in the night, barely perceptible as it falls, and yet clothing all in its shimmering mantle. Had we been forewarned of the date and the hour, we might have looked expectantly towards heaven only to see nothing. For this was not how God was to come.
For He came not on the clouds of Heaven, but forth from His own creation, changing us forever, though yet we perceived it not. The dust from which we were formed, imbued now with the dew of the heavens, its form unaltered but its essence forever transformed: not so that eyes in the darkness of night would see it, but that in Heaven’s light we should see the glistening presence of the Emmanuel there, God with us in a manner we never dared even dream of. For it is in the Incarnation that we see the tenderness of God through the gentleness of His coming. Not destroying that which by its nature is corrupt but bestowing on it His own nature in a redemption, the only pain for which was to be His to bear.
For He loved that which at the dawn of time He brought into being, with a love that designed as our consummation a perfect union with Himself. And since we refused to become one with Him by returning the love we first received of His Spirit, He condescended to us, becoming one with us that we might be one with Him and with the Father who sent Him both to create and redeem, to originate and consummate the divine love for man.
So shall we be lifted high by this dew that fell upon the arid dust of our mortal flesh. For in the day of His return, His glorious light shall lift again the dew that fell in the twilight of man’s days: the warmth of Christ the rising sun drawing love’s dew back to its source, and with it, we who will receive Him as Saviour and King, as Love Incarnate, as God made man, on Christmas Day.
Rorate Caeli de super et nubes pluant iustum:
aperiatur terra, et germinet salvatorem.
Introitus, ad Missam Dominica IV Adventus