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January 6, 2000
Epiphany
The sixth day of January, the last of Christmas.The Holiday Season, in practice, ends with the blunt trauma of New Year’s Day, salved, perhaps, with a little football. Winter bleakly awaits. Dull days and slow fluids. Yet the Season extends: Tradition has it that on the twelfth day after the Nativity, wise men from the East arrived, guided by a star, bearing varied gifts. They certified the child’s importance.
Now that’s my kind of story!
I like the idea that the savior needs the endorsement of these exotic intellectuals.
Actually, the Magi serve as initiators, and presage Baptism, which is celebrated as Theophany, on the Sunday following Epiphany. Both words mean “manifestation”, as of the divine. The early churches associated these feast days with the celebration of the Nativity, and marked them, separately or simultaneously, anywhere from December 25th to January 6th. Also in the mix was a celebration of the water-into-wine miracle, and just to confuse matters further, the Julian/Gregorian calendar schism has continued to diverge, so that the Eastern Christians are now celebrating Christmas on January 7th. Thus the Christmastide ends in a welter of overlapping dates and symbols.
But end it does. There is some memory of the occasion left in contemporary practice, if only in the notion that decorations should come down by the 6th. (Capitalism can wring no more from the season, and discards it. Meanwhile, the start of the holiday is being signaled earlier each year, expanding the purchasing window.)
Yes, Christmas is truly over, which is to say, we now have perspective on it.
Looking back we see:
Birth. Baptism. Initiation. Manifestation.
All indicate attainment of a new status, and with it, revelation; the insight of a different viewpoint.
This the perspective of Epiphany, which, as attested by the associated Incarnation, is also the perspective of humanity: that we see a thing differently from within and without, that a change in perspective reveals our error, and that we thereby have the ability to correct ourselves.
Celebration of the holidays teaches us these corrections, and if we learn their lesson, we are changed.
Who among us would stay the same?
For the last time (this Season), Merry Christmas!