Christmas as It Was 1,500 Years Ago

Singing Gregorian chants, praying in Latin and surrounded by the smell of incense, the Norbertine priests at St. Michael’s Abbey began celebrating the birth of Jesus on Christmas Eve in a service that has remained virtually unchanged for more than 1,500 years.

“If you were a person from St. Augustine’s day and you came tonight, you’d know exactly what was going on,” said Father Hugh Barbour, prior of the abbey, located on a hilltop just east of Mission Viejo.

The First Vespers--or evening prayers--of Christmas were observed seven hours before the traditional Catholic midnight Christmas Mass.

The early start on Christmas comes from the Roman tradition where major celebrations were anticipated by feasts before the actual event, said Abbott Eugene Hayes, head of the monastery that houses 61 men. The abbey still holds four Latin Masses each week, something the Catholic Church has moved away from since the mid-1960s.

At Monday’s evening prayer service, the priests wore their brilliant white habits and sang Christmas-themed hymns and Psalms using Gregorian chants. The Norbertines were split between two choir lofts on either side of the church, and at times each group took turns singing verses, allowing the melodies to travel back and forth across the sanctuary.

The priests also recited prayers and read from Scripture during the 30-minute service, the beginning of an evening-long Christmas observance that includes an all-night party called gaudeamus (Latin for “let us rejoice”).

“Though this is the first day we celebrate Christmas, it still has a feeling of expectation,” Barbour said. “It crowns the Advent season and brings spiritual relief.”

The Norbertines were founded on Christmas 882 years ago by St. Norbert, a German, who gave up his wealth for life as a poor priest following a strict regimen of prayer and penance. He started the monastic order as a reform to the lax clerical standards of his day. He wanted priests to return to the practices that Augustine developed in the 4th century.

Though the order was founded before the more famous Franciscans, Dominicans or Jesuits, there are only three other Norbertine communities in the United States. There are 33 in Europe.

The Norbertines try to live a balanced life centered around the worship of God, living as a community and service to the church.

Brother Ambrose, 27, celebrated his first anniversary as a novice, or priest in training, at St. Michael’s on Christmas Eve. A native of Denver, he said he dropped out of Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar to join the abbey. Though his memories drift at times to his family during the holidays, he said he mostly reflected on the happiness his new calling has brought him.

“It’s a kind of joy unmatched by any joy of the world,” Brother Ambrose said. “There’s certainly some suffering that goes with it, but that’s also encompassed by the joy.”

One of the joys the priests talked about was to participate in a ceremony--such as the First Vespers of Christmas--that has been performed nearly identically for centuries, except for the electric lights, the microphones and the green exit signs over the doors.

“It puts us in contact with our religious ancestors,” Brother Ambrose said. “We’re part of the continual prayer of the church from the beginning.”