On the Seventh Day of Christmas...

And so we continue our stroll through the twelve days of Christmas, having arrived on the seventh day. I thought it would be fun and meaningful to excavate what many would assume is a silly sing-a-long song, yet it’s history carries quite the opposite. If you missed days one through six, I unpacked them in the previous post, so flip back a page and give it a read. All set? Great, then on…

The seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me... Seven Swans A Swimming. One of the first Christians, a fella we often call the Apostle Paul, writes in his letter to the church Rome about the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit: Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Service, and Fear (also understood as Compassion by way of Awe and Wonder) of the Divine. You can find this in Romans 12:6-8, for reference.

Now, I held to the traditional Catholc labeling of the gifts, but you will find that the many different English translations of the Bible use a number of different words. So, we best unpack what’s underneath or behind these gifts. But before unpacking each gift, I want to highlight the context in which Paul writes his letter. At the time, Rome was the global military superpower of the day, and to not honor and offer worship to the Roman Emperor, would be paramount to treason. The emperor was incessantly proclaiming that he was a human who was divine. Jesus, and those who followed after the resurrection, proclaimed that he was the Divine who was human. The difference is far beyond semantics. The emperor was trying to convince people that he transcended lowly humanity, while Jesus descended into humanity, was one with humanity, in order to rescue and restore humanity. The emperor claimed to escape humanity, Jesus lived as human in order to save humanity. It was then understood that Jesus was the only one who embodied all of the seven gifts, and through the Holy Spirit, followers of Jesus are individually imbued with gifts that unified and made whole in community. Our shared life together, also known as the Body of Christ… or the church.

The gifts are less about individuality, and are more about a community, or body, of gifts that are poured out for participating with the Divine in healing the world. This should awaken us to the wonkiness of the many gathering to simply watch, and maybe even be entertained by, a few exercising their gifts… and then call that church. That would be an anemic body, which would be unsustainable. And that type of body would eventually deteriorate and disintegrate (wink, wink, a good bit of what is unfolding with much of the Amercian church). Each of our gifts participate in and with the others to build up the body, which is the church. By its very nature, the church is diverse and wide reaching in its fucntion. The empowered and exercising church is good news to… ALL… to the wider community and society. And I could go on… until the keys give out on my computer, but let’s give a broef picture of each gift.

Wisdom: The truths of our faith are more important than the things of this world, and wisdom helps us to properly order our relationship to the created world.

Understanding: While wisdom is the desire to contemplate the things of the Divine, understanding allows us to grasp the very essence of the truth of our faith. This transcends, yet includes, the mind. This is about an embodied trust in the Divine… the movement of Word to Way… the heart of what we celebrate in Christmas. The incarnation of Christ, the Divine born in the flesh.

Counsel: we are able to judge how best to act almost by intuition, which is, of course, the Holy Spirit guiding and counseling us.

Fortitude: is placed as the fourth gift of the Holy Spirit because it gives us the strength to follow through on the actions advised by the gift of counsel. Beautiful.

Knowledge: where wisdom provides us the desire to judge all things according to the truths of the faith, knowledge is the actual ability to do so. Like counsel, knowledge is aimed at our actions in this life. Knowledge demands action, or as the arc of the Biblical narrative puts it, the Word moves to flesh. This is Jacob waking up from his dream and proclaiming, “Surely the LORD is in this place—and I didn not know it!” (Genesis 28:16). Jacob has an awareness, a knowing of the Divine that had previously escaped him. The Hebrew word behind the English word, know, is yāḏa, and it’s an experiential knowing. It’s also a Jewish euphemism for sex… which is used to communicate an intimate, fully embodied kind of knowing.

Ignorance is to ignore by your actions what you know with your intellect.

Service: the willingness to worship and serve the Divine… in and through serving others. Service takes that willingness beyond a sense of duty, so that we desire to worship the Divine and to serve Him and others out of love.

Fear of the Divine (Awe and Wonder)::The fear of the Divine arises out of awakening to the deepest depths of love, which creates in us a cocktail of awe and wonder for the Divine. And that continuously shapes or reshapes our heart in learning how we move to love all people.

Day seven, such a… gift. Day eight will find us in the new year, so much grace and peace until then.