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The Christmas Cycle
He enlightens us with His grace and love during those precious moments when He rests in the
tabernacle of our soul. My Lord and my God for time and eternity! “Blessed are they that have
not seen and have believed.” The day will come when the veil that conceals His glory from our
eyes is to be taken away. Then we shall see Him face to face. Such will be the reward of our faith.
Prayer
Grant us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, to glory in the feast day of Thy blessed apostle, Thomas,
that we may be ever assisted by his patronage and may at all times imitate his faith with fitting
devotion. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
The “O” Antiphons
December 17, O Sapientia
“O Wisdom, who camest out of the mouth of the Most High, reaching from end to end and
ordering all things mightily and sweetly, come to teach us the way of prudence.”
O Wisdom! The Savior whom we shall find as a weak babe in the crib is the Wisdom which from
eternity proceeds from the Father. The eternal Wisdom which comes to us in the person of the
Savior, has devised everything that is: heaven and earth, angels and men, matter and spirit, the
entire universe. It has formed all creatures and given them their outward form and their place in
the order of creation. It has fixed the wonderful order of nature, and it governs its laws. Its power
guides and directs all creation, even to the last particle of dust. The power of this gentle and mighty
Spirit has its eternal designs upon the world and pervades and governs all that exists. Eternal
Wisdom, resting as a child in the lap of Thy mother, I believe in Thee. How great Thou art in the
works of Thy creation, how wonderful is the order of Thy universe, how merciful in the work of
redemption, how sublimely humble in Thy crib, how divinely wise in the teachings of Thy gospel,
how provident in the work of Thy holy Church! O divine Wisdom, let me understand Thee.
Divine Wisdom clothes itself in the nature of a man. It conceals itself in the weakness of
a child. It chooses for itself, infancy, poverty, obedience, subjection, obscurity. “I will destroy
the wisdom of the wise and the prudence of the prudent I will reject. . . . Hath not God made
foolish the wisdom of this world? For seeing that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom
knew not God, it pleased God, by the foolishness of our preaching, to save them that believe. For
both the Jews require signs, and the Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified,
unto the Jews, indeed, a stumbling block, and unto the Gentiles foolishness; but unto them
that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. . . . But
the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that He may confound the wise; and the weak
things of the world hath God chosen, that He may confound the strong. And the base things of
the world and the things that are contemptible, hath God chosen, and the things that are not,
that He might bring to nought things that are” (1 Cor 1:19 ff.).
Come, O divine Wisdom, teach us the way of knowledge. We are unwise; we judge and
speak according to the vain standards of the world, which is foolishness in the eyes of God.
Come, O divine Wisdom, give us the true knowledge and the taste for what is eternal and divine.
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