I HAVE SAID IT BEFORE, AND I SAY IT AGAIN

One of my favorite homilists is Father George W. Rutler, Pastor of Our Savior Church in Manhattan, New York.  Here is his thought for Sunday, January 3, 2010:

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A Boston acquaintance of James Whistler did not approve of Lowell, Massachusetts, where Whistler had been born. “Whatever possessed you to be born in a place like that?” The artist replied, “I wished to be near my mother.” There are various reasons why Christ was born in Bethlehem, but the most obvious one was because his mother happened to be there. The Feast of the Mother of God on January 1 is part of the twelve-day celebration of the Nativity mystery. The Church insists on celebrating each day from Christmas to Epiphany, and it strictly forbids fasting in this time.

In recent times, it has been suggested that the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” starting with a partridge, was a secret Catholic code for times of persecution in England, the symbols representing elements of the Catechism. I was rather disappointed to learn that this probably is not so. It actually has some French precedents, and many of the catechetical items in it are not peculiar to Catholicism. The partridge was not introduced in England until the 1770’s. The Greek word for partridge, a genus of pheasant, is “Perdix,” who in mythology was the nephew of the inventor Daedalus, who became jealous when Perdix invented the drawing compass and saw. Daedalus threw Perdix off a roof of the Acropolis, but the goddess Athena saved the young man and turned him into a bird that flies very little and builds its nest on the ground in remembrance of its fall.

That may be no more fanciful than reading into the Christmas song a catechetical meaning. But that does not prevent making the song into a catechesis for ourselves. First, if the partridge symbolizes Christ, the pear tree opposes the “forbidden tree” of Genesis. The two turtle doves are the two Testaments, which both are the revealed Word of God. The three French hens are the three theological virtues. The four calling birds are the four Major Prophets and the four Evangelists. The five gold rings can be the five wounds of Christ, and the five of the Seven Sacraments which are obligatory (Matrimony and Holy Orders being special vocations). The six geese a-laying are the six days of creation, and the seven swans a-swimming are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, as well as the seven works of corporal mercy and the seven works of spiritual mercy. The eight maids a-milking give us the eight Beatitudes, the nine ladies dancing are the nine ranks of angel choirs, the ten lords a-leaping are the ten commandments, the eleven pipers piping are the eleven faithful apostles, and the twelve drummers drumming are the twelve points of the Apostles’ Creed. These twelve Christmas days are a good time to look up and study these gifts symbolized as part of the season’s feasting.