THE ROSE-FINGERED DAWN

As we reach the end of Advent, we make Bertolt Brecht’s words our own: “Today we are sitting, on Christmas Eve, / we, poor people, / in a cold little room, / the wind blows outside, the wind comes in. / Come, good Lord Jesus, to us, turn your gaze: / because we truly need you.” We are therefore more than ever awaiting a Presence beyond the inevitability of fate. A sign of this anxiety, according to an image of the Poet, is the chair (“We are sitting”). In a house, the empty chair is ready for the guest who can arrive unexpectedly and attests—in a reading of faith—a glimpse of the soul that cries out to the Invisible. But the coming of God, the coming of His Christ, does not depend on us. It is He who must rend the heavens and descend, as Isaiah so clearly attests (63:19). We are as if in a sort of desert, with its annihilating vastness, with very few oases and rare mirages. Against this backdrop, we are traversed by sensations of nothingness and infinity, of darkness and of hope. Like Ungaretti, we experience the cities we inhabit as temporary abodes, and we are in a perpetual search for a place free from evil. In this regard, in a letter to Papini, the Poet wrote: “Am I an imaginary persecuted person or an exile toward the promised land?”   What exorcises the darkness—Ungaretti helps us again—is the “rose-fingered” dawn, a powerful image that from Homer to Hesiod indicates the path toward the light, an emblem of life beyond death. And the rosy-fingered dawn is the prophecy of Isaiah that announces the birth of Emmanuel from a virgin (cf. Isaiah 7:14); the rosy-fingered dawn is the faith of Joseph, who believes in dreams, believes in the night voices in which he recognizes the word of the Most High (Mt 1:20-21); the rosy-fingered dawn is Mary, whose child she conceived comes from the Spirit. And in the crescendo of light, the face of the Saviour appears (cf. Mt 1:21), Light from Light, Day without sunset.

Novalis sang:

Winter melts; a cradle
is the beginning of what sprouts
the earth begins again
the beginning of the world is a child.

Commentary by b. Sandro Carotta, osb
Abbazia di Praglia (Italy)

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves,
Prinknash Abbey