O Antiphon Reflections 2025
As Advent culminates, our expectation of the Christ Child’s coming reaches its fullness! Together with the whole Church, we celebrate this crescendo with a series of special O Antiphons, traditionally sung as bookends to the Magnificat during Vespers, from December 17 through December 23.
Each antiphon, one per day, beckons God’s birth by invoking one of God’s ancient sacred names. While Cistercians typically prefer simple chant style, we do really delight in singing this series of lengthy, beautiful, and richly symbolic prayers!
In addition to chanting them at the Divine Office, it is our custom here at Mississippi Abbey for the sisters to take turns offering brief reflections on each day’s O Antiphon, which we listen to during morning Chapter. In the coming days, we’ll post short excerpts from our sisters’ reflections. May they bless your final Advent-en meditations, as they do ours!
O Wisdom
“…O come, come beloved Wisdom. Come, respond to our longing. Speak your tender word from all eternity.
O Come! We hope, we long, we remember.
Come, build your house, find a home to live in in humanity.
O Wisdom, come!”
O Adonai
“…God’s desire to communicate with us has only one purpose: to share his divine life. His relationship with Moses not only redeemed a people from bondage, but also gave them the precious gift of the Law, a way of life that gives meaning to human existence.
Jesus is not only the Lawgiver on Sinai, but is himself our Law, our way of life.
Come, O Lord, redeem us from our war. From our addictions. From our sins. Show us the way of Love!”
O Root
“…Roots are hidden in the ground. No one ever sees them, and yet, without them, no plant, flower, or tree would ever flourish. Roots are essential, yet humble.
Jesus the Root is our model of humility. He says, ‘Come to me, gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.’ (Matthew 11:28-29)
Come, O Root of Jesse, come to save us from our selves, our pride, without delay!”
O Key
“…We are God house – our monastery, our community, each one of us. And Jesus is the key to everything, every part.
He enters in. He knows each one of us, our complexities and our wounds, and only his love can enter perfectly into our locked hearts and free us from our prisons.
Let him enter, Key of David’s house!”
O Dawn
“…Just as nature awaits the coming of spring, and the world awaits the coming of dawn, the soul awaits the coming of Christ each day.
And in the book of the prophet Malachi, at the very end of his last chapter, just as the Old Testament concludes and we turn the page into the New – like when the first inkling of dawn breaks upon Earth’s dark horizon – we find it written, ‘But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will arise with healing in its rays.’ (Malachi 4:2)
O Jesus, Light of the world, come!”
O King
“…Today’s nations are still clamoring for kings. But true kingship really does simplify things. As our brother Christophe of Tiberhine, who was all too familiar with power-struggles both outside and in, put it in his journal only 32 Advents ago, ‘The Child says: Love one another.’
O Christ Child, O Love, O King, please come. Please come, bound down, surprise us and embrace us and pacify us and don’t let us go. Make of our clamorous hearts your simple, earthen, loving home.”
O Emmanuel
“…O Come Emmanuel! Come uninvited into my soul. I have not provided you a proper place. I have given your rooms away to other tenants. No vacancy! But there is a cave, a hollow in that hard rock of my being where you may be born. It is in my weakness, in my poverty, in my eccentricities and foibles, in my constant need to be forgiven for my sins – There, there, is where you come to dwell. There I offer you a place, there where you have already come, O Emmanuel, there where I need to come in and be welcomed by you.”
Maranatha!
Come, Lord Jesus! Lord Jesus, you have come.