Blood in the Egg Nog
Years ago just before Christmas, I heard a beloved Seminary Professor make a provocative and powerful statement. He said, “The Christmas Octave is when the Church decides to pour blood into our egg nog.” That image has stuck in my mind for years, and when I think about the occasionally maddeningly complex interplay of Christmas Octave and Saint’s Feast Days, especially when it comes to the Liturgy of the Hours, I truly believe that the Church must consider this period extremely important, because she goes through so many lengths to keep the whole intact, and has for many centuries.
The Comites Christi
The Saints that make up the Christmas Octave have been traditionally known as the Comites Christi or ‘Companions of Christ’, although I usually do not like that translation. The word comes in Latin has strong martial and courtly connotations. A comes was not just a person who accompanied you to the pub or the sports field. A comes, especially if he were in government or in the military, was someone whom the Emperor charged with a special function. It is not just a relationship of affection or loyalty, but a place of special honor in the graces of the monarch.
There are several comites then in the Christmas Octave: St. Stephen (December 26) St. John the Apostle (December 27) The Holy Innocents (December 28), St. Thomas Becket (December 29) and St. Sylvester (December 31).
Unlike the otherworldly radiance of Christ’s Victory over death at Easter, the light that comes from the birth of Christ, although radiant, is nevertheless one clothed in mortal flesh. Thus, the light of Christ at the Nativity, like at the Resurrection, is unconquerable: but here on earth, it casts a long shadow.
St. Stephen, Christ’s Soldier (Dec 26)
St. Stephen, called also in the East protomartyr or literally the “First Witness/Martyr”, is the first mentioned in all Christian History to shed his blood and die for Christ, as recounted in the Acts of the Apostles. St. Stephen’s martyrdom is explicitly Christocentric, in that he, like Christ, both prays for his persecutors, and also sees what his persecutors could not and would not, as Christ himself said during his trial before the Sanhedrin (Mark 14:62): St. Stephen saw Christ seated at the right hand of the Father. We remember the words of Christ that if “they persecuted me, they will persecute you” (John 15:20), and also, “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Timothy 3:12). This is a law in the spiritual order.
To focus on one of the first people to die for Christ just after we celebrated the unmerited love of his Holy Incarnation seems counter intuitive, but then comes Saint John the Evangelist, the Bard of the Incarnation, to our rescue.
St. John, the Bard of the Incarnation (Dec 27)
No one can deny the narrative and spiritual power of St. John’s Gospel. It is the most theologically developed and the most insistent on the Divinity of Christ. Although John has no Infancy Narrative strictly speaking, St. John by inspiration chose to write about the Word Made Flesh, insisting that the Babe of Bethlehem was also in fact the Eternal Word of the Father, existing eternally. St. John’s sublime contemplation assists us for what is to come in the rest of the Octave, because he gives us a theological primer to understand why the Octave is otherwise so full of blood, from the very lips of the Savior himself:
“And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come into the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.” (John 3:20)
Arguably, it is the contest between that Eternal Light that is Christ and the forces of evil which creates the primary drama of all the Gospels, with Christ emerging triumphant in the duel.
The Holy Innocents, “Ex Ore Infantium perfecisti laudem” (Dec 28)
December 28th, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, is without a doubt the most controversial of the Octave’s Feasts, featuring as it does the slaughter, by Herod the Great, of an indeterminate number of children under the age of two. Hyperbolic numbers which emerged in the Middle Ages put the number in the thousands, while most scholars reckon it only in the dozens. Nevertheless, the event has been commemorated liturgically by the Church from very early antiquity. Many scholars want to dismiss the event as an invention of St. Matthew in his Gospel, mostly because the event is not attested to by any contemporary secular historian. Yet such an action is very consistent with the well known character of Herod the Great, who even killed his own sons in his paranoia regarding threats to his power.
Although St. Stephen has always been called protomartyr, the early Christians recognized that these young children in some mysterious way also bore witness to Christ by their death. This tragic event highlights for us the depth of evil in the world, and just how deeply disturbed our fallen state truly is: that the first reaction of the ruler of Judea was not to welcome the Messiah, but to destroy him. The orthodox Christian faith has a realist anthropology: and it does not shrink from acknowledging that there is something of Herod in each of us, a little tyrant that will remove anything and anyone that gets in the way of getting what we want. It is not just Herod that killed innocents: in our own way, by our commissions and omissions, we too create the conditions for justice to be suppressed, and for violence and hatred to flourish.
Yet nevertheless, the constant refrain of this Feast is that of Psalm 8: “From the lips of infants you have perfected praise.” Is there anything quite like the prayer of the innocent child? In recent history, we remember the tears of now-Justice Kavanaugh on national television as he recounted how his daughter prayed for those who calumniated him and his family. No matter what one thinks of those hearings, very few were untouched by that manifestation of grace in a maelstrom of very ‘adult’ depravity. And I cannot help but think that, even after the dust settled from those hearings, the true leaders of our nation were not the Senators, Lawyers and Twittering Class: it was a little girl kneeling by her bedside, praying for people who hated her Dad. From the lips of the innocent, our God perfects praise.
And God too ordains, through the Incarnation of his Only Begotten Son, to likewise restore our innocence…if we let him. He will perfect our praise by perfecting us. He will make us new men and women, if we accept the freshness and beauty of the love of the Infant King.
St. Thomas Becket, God’s Herald (Dec 29)
At this point, it is helpful to note that with the exception of the Holy Innocents and the Blessed Mother herself, all of the Octave Saints are in fact Ordained Clergy. St. Thomas Becket, whose Feast falls on December 29, was probably the most popular Saint of the Middle Ages after St. Francis of Assisi. He is a perfect comes Christi because he too, like Saint Stephen and the Holy Innocents, met with conflict against authorities dead set on power and domination. In his own life, he opposed King Henry II of England, who attempted to curtail and suppress the rights of the Church in England, and bind them more to the English Crown than to Rome. St. Thomas Becket opposed this plan, (unlike most of the English Bishops, who largely acquiesced) fleeing to Continental Europe to preserve his personal liberty as he continued to oppose King Henry in exile. Most infamously, he was savagely murdered at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral, his brains reported to have been spread across the floor of the sanctuary.
St. Thomas Becket reminds us then of the power of one man who takes a stand as Christ’s Companion, and especially the glory of a Priest who, in the name of protecting his flock from sin and error, pays the ultimate price. He is a great exemplar to all Bishops especially in this age of conformity and cowardice, where he was outstanding in his resistance to the overreach of secular authority. Most appropriately to the time in which we live, St. Thomas Becket was a lover of Priests: the proximate matter of his definitive break with King Henry was that he would not allow a secular potentate to judge a cleric! How different are the times in which we live, in which Bishops turn in, and turn on, their Priest sons on sometimes the most unsubstantiated pretexts, or perhaps even worse, fail to punish those within the house of God who do such harm to the Body of Christ, whose guardians they are! May God be pleased to send us many more men as St. Thomas Becket!
St. Sylvester, God’s Pontifex Maximus (Dec 31)
Finally, St. Sylvester, a celebrated figure from the time of the Emperor Constantine and the emergence of Christianity from the catacombs, was witness to both the horrific persecutions of Diocletian, and then as Pope, of the great First Council of Nicea. Although part of the accounts regarding his warm relationship between himself and the Emperor Constantine are a fabrication, such as the infamous Donation of Constantine, what cannot be disputed is that St. Sylvester led the Roman Church at a pivotal time in her transition, and so became a great example of how the Church and the State, which may be enemies in one age, can work quite effectively together in another. The Church shows herself eager to work for the care of the poor, the education of the ignorant, and the love of all people. Above all, she asks for the liberty to be herself, to be able to proclaim the Gospel and Christ’s saving word to all the world. Thus, while St. Thomas Becket was an example of having to resist an oppressive state, St. Sylvester shows us something which in a sense is more difficult: fidelity to Christ in an age of prosperity, because prosperity and comfort have a way of seducing the soul which persecution and trial do not. Yet nevertheless, we are called in every age to build links to the time in which we live, while pointing to eternity: hence, St. Sylvester was truly a Pontifex Maximus worthy of the name, that ancient Roman title assumed by the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, as the Chief Bridgebuilder. As Christ, the Word made Flesh, is the bridge between the Divine and the Human, so too we are meant to be Christ’s bridges. In so doing, we too become comites Christi.
The Mother of God: The Mother of Martyrs, Friends of the Friends of Christ (Jan 1)
The Octave Day of Christmas is often overlooked in discussions of the comites Christi, but is all too appropriate to focus on the one human being most intimately associated with the work of her Divine Son: the Blessed Virgin Mary. This woman, who accompanied Jesus in all his trials, also was present in the Early Church of Saint Stephen, was the charge of Saint John, and a Jewish Mother who must have reacted to the Massacre of the Innocents with horror. She was the great intercessor of the Church of St. Thomas Becket and St. Sylvester, and will remain so until the end of the age.
The Christmas Octave, then, sends us off in the arms of Mary, as we recall that the tenderness which Christ received from her sinless heart is also directed toward us, his brothers in the order of grace.
The Ancient Romans celebrated January as the month of Janus, who was a two-faced god of beginnings and endings. The god is literally an ambivalent one, a transitional god from whom no one knew whether one could expect war or peace, prosperity or poverty, or any conceivable benefit. He is a perfect example of a pagan pantheon dominated by gods who were venal and ultimately uninterested in humanity and its good.
How different then, is the placement of Mary at the head of the old month of Janus, and the end of the Christmas Octave! She too is a figure of ‘transition’, but she could not be more different. She is not an ambivalent figure, from whom we may expect weal or woe. Instead, she is the bearer of the light of the world, the joy of the nations. She thus presents the supreme dethronement of the old heathen pantheons, because on her lap has been raised the one and only true God, before whom all idols fall.
As the first and foremost of the comites Christi, Our Blessed Mother shows her maternal care over all our days, but also shows us her own delegated sovereignty as Mother of the King of Kings. With her protecting us, we may go forward in confidence in the New Year, but also in power: for we too have a role in the great combat, to defeat the forces of darkness and raise up Christ in the hearts and minds of all humanity.
If you and I allow these friends of Christ to inspire us this Christmas Octave, I daresay it is nearly impossible for us likewise not to become his comites: his companions in battle and in the governance and exaltation of Holy Mother Church throughout the world. May we all have such a great honor, not only to be called Christ’s friends, but by doing what he commands, to be so in truth. Amen.
