“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” Jennifer Woodruff Tait IT WAS DECEMBER 21 in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, and writer Kathleen Norris was hunting in the most unlikely place for nuns. For over 12 centuries, monasteries and convents throughout Christendom have, during the final week of Advent, chanted a series of verses at vesper services before the Magnificat or Song of Mary from Luke 1:46– 55 (“My soul magnifies the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior”). These verses, known as the “Great O Antiphons,” each name Christ by a different biblical title: Wisdom, Adonai, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring or Radiant Dawn, King of Nations (or of the Gentiles), Emmanuel.
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A WILD ANTIPHON CHASE
Instead, her publisher insisted she make a stop in Los Angeles to publicize her bestseller Dakota. As she wrote in her memoir, The Cloister Walk, the publisher’s publicist was no help in finding a monastic community where she could sing vespers; his job was “arranging interviews and putting me in a tony hotel in Beverly Hills, thinking, as he cheerfully put it, that it would make a nice contrast with the monastery.” Leads from a friend of a friend pointed her to Mount St. Mary’s College, high above the city. On her way, she stopped to do a scheduled radio interview and told the talk show host how she had “schemed for months to find the O Antiphons in the city. I doubt that it was the looniest interview the woman had all day, but it had its moments.”
Christian History
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THE STORY BEHIND THE SEASON’S MOST SOMBER HYMN
Norris (a Presbyterian laywoman, poet, and Benedictine oblate) had spent much of the year in a writing residency at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, and had hoped that she might be able to sing the O Antiphons with the community of monks there before returning to Hawaii to spend Christmas with her family.