The Eastern Churches call this season “Theopany”—a manifestation of God. Our word “Epiphany” conveys the same idea. The Christmas Gospel recounts the anonymity of His birth. The Lord Jesus was born in a cowstall in the middle of the night while the whole world slept. Epiphany shows us how that God reveals Himself to those who have eyes to see—then and now.
In the Gospel readings of Epiphanytide, His epiphanies are delightfully obvious with delightfully subtle asides. When we begin the season, with the all-too-familiar story of the Three Kings, it’s worth remembering it’s really a story about four Kings—the three Magi bearing their precious and prophetic gifts, and the evil Herod: Three Wise Men who understand Who the Child is, and a King who will not see because he doesn’t want to. Through the season we have these epiphanies—the Holy Ghost descends as a dove when the Lord is baptized, the Doctors of Theology in the Temple listen struck mute at “the understanding and answers of a twelve-year-old, cleaning water turned into the choicest wine so a wedding party can keep going strong. These are pictures, not just of God revealing Himself, but of how He does it, why He does it, and what our response is to it—then and now.
Of course, epiphanies continue. God still reveals Himself.
As then, so now. Scripture speaks so truthfully and powerfully to us because the stories it tells, the people it describes and the God it reveals are all ring true in the experiences of our own lives. Some of us find life pregnant and rich with the presence of God; others see—and so not surprisingly find—nothing.
For the Three Kings, God was born in Bethlehem; for the fourth, King Herod, it wasn’t a Savior but a threat born that night. While St John Baptist saw God descend as a dove that day on the banks of the Jordan, others saw only a bird.
The Church is Christ’s presence on earth now, living by His Spirit, active in the lives of His people: it’s His on-going epiphany. God speaks to us at Mass and in the Daily Office through His Scriptures; His presence manifests itself to us in His Sacraments; He guides us day to day through the teaching of His Saints. He entwines Himself into the daily circumstances of our lives.
And for all this, we wonder at His absence.
It’s not that God doesn’t show Himself; it's just that we’re looking for something else.
No matter how many other “something elses” we pursue—and all of us do, me more than many others—none of them will ever satisfy us. We leave a trail of broken toys behind us, things we had to have which we only discovered after the fact weren’t the Thing we wanted.
Epiphanytide comes around year after year, telling us the old stories, offering us the chance to find God afresh, delightfully obvious, in ways both ordinary and wonderful.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Saturday, January 7, 2012
When Ye Feast...
In his wonderful theology/cookbook, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection, Fr Robert Capon wrote, “when you fast, fast with rigor—bare-knuckled, as if you meant it. Ah! and when you feast, eat such foods, drink such wines, sing such songs, relish such companions so as to make the angels envious!”
This week, we entered Epiphanytide. The entrance of the Three Kings encourages us to prolong our Christmas feasting with paper crowns and King Cakes and houseblessings. The traditional calendar, like Fr Capon, doesn’t want us to quit the feast until it’s well and truly ended.
Anglicans value our past without unnecessarily disparaging our present or future prospects. We cling to the old, sometimes not knowing why, certain only that it’s good, like an old Gershwin song we know can’t be bettered.
Our speech is filled with wonderful words, now falling into disuse, which tell of rich meanings: Christmastide, Epiphanytide, Eastertide, Whitsundtide, Trinitytide are among such words. The old English suffix “-tide” at the end of a word means “a time of feasting.” The use wasn’t exclusively ecclesiastical. “Hocktide,” the Monday and Tuesday of Easter Week, was many centuries ago not tied to Easter; it was a week-long celebration of the expulsion of the Viking invaders from England in 1002.
I point this out, not to bemoan the loss of antique Anglo-Saxon terminology, but to suggest those terms enshrine something we should not forget: there are times of feasting and times of fasting, and both are knotted to living the Christian life.
In our world nowadays, Christmas is December 25. It comes one day and goes away the next; somebody “tying one on” could miss the whole thing! Even those who know “the Twelve Days of Christmas” as something more than a Christmas-time song often think it refers to the twelve days before Christmas—more than one person has told me so, very knowingly.
Christmastide, Epiphanytide and the rest tell us that Christians are to celebrate, to revel in, to “throughly” (to use another grand old Anglo-Saxon word) enjoy our feasts. Fr Capon exhorts us: “fast with rigor” when the Fast is here (and it’s coming, beloved), but feast with joy. Heaven, we’ve been promised by the Lord Jesus Himself, is a joyful Banquet—a Feast which will never end. The feasts appointed for us are foretastes of that unending Banquet to which we’ve been specially invited.
We are sacramental creatures. God made us sacramental. That doesn’t only refer to the Seven Sacraments of the church—it’s really the other way around: the Sacraments work in and on us with such profundity because we are sacramental. A kiss, a flag, a smile—these things are sacramental, meaningful, carrying their meaning in the things themselves. Feasts, as everything else we do, are sacramental, too.
When we empty life of feasting (and fasting!) we empty it of content. Our Christmas has been gutted because it’s been re-defined by television advertising and a shopping frenzy into a time of saccharine sentimentality about “goodwill to men,” forgetting Gloria in excelsis as politically inconvenient.
The sacramental Christian is called by his very existence, by the fact that God bothered to create him, to suck the marrow-bone of life dry. Live as if you matter. We were made for joy, for feasting (only a feaster can really know how to fast!).
An old Louisiana custom grasps this without bothering to stop and explain. At a Christmastide dinner party the other night, a fun discussion about the tradition of the King’s Cake showed this afresh. We talked about the King’s Cake, a European custom dating back almost a thousand years. Universally it's served up as part of the Epiphanytide celebration—except in Louisiana and south-east Texas. There it’s a custom of Mardi Gras. Why? Because it keeps the Epiphanytide celebrations going to the very last minute, carrying them not beyond, but to the threshold of Lent itself.
We’re made for feasting because we’re made for joy. Epiphanytide lasts till February 4. Keep the feast till then, and “make the angels envious!”—Fr Gregory Wilcox
This week, we entered Epiphanytide. The entrance of the Three Kings encourages us to prolong our Christmas feasting with paper crowns and King Cakes and houseblessings. The traditional calendar, like Fr Capon, doesn’t want us to quit the feast until it’s well and truly ended.
Anglicans value our past without unnecessarily disparaging our present or future prospects. We cling to the old, sometimes not knowing why, certain only that it’s good, like an old Gershwin song we know can’t be bettered.
Our speech is filled with wonderful words, now falling into disuse, which tell of rich meanings: Christmastide, Epiphanytide, Eastertide, Whitsundtide, Trinitytide are among such words. The old English suffix “-tide” at the end of a word means “a time of feasting.” The use wasn’t exclusively ecclesiastical. “Hocktide,” the Monday and Tuesday of Easter Week, was many centuries ago not tied to Easter; it was a week-long celebration of the expulsion of the Viking invaders from England in 1002.
I point this out, not to bemoan the loss of antique Anglo-Saxon terminology, but to suggest those terms enshrine something we should not forget: there are times of feasting and times of fasting, and both are knotted to living the Christian life.
In our world nowadays, Christmas is December 25. It comes one day and goes away the next; somebody “tying one on” could miss the whole thing! Even those who know “the Twelve Days of Christmas” as something more than a Christmas-time song often think it refers to the twelve days before Christmas—more than one person has told me so, very knowingly.
Christmastide, Epiphanytide and the rest tell us that Christians are to celebrate, to revel in, to “throughly” (to use another grand old Anglo-Saxon word) enjoy our feasts. Fr Capon exhorts us: “fast with rigor” when the Fast is here (and it’s coming, beloved), but feast with joy. Heaven, we’ve been promised by the Lord Jesus Himself, is a joyful Banquet—a Feast which will never end. The feasts appointed for us are foretastes of that unending Banquet to which we’ve been specially invited.
We are sacramental creatures. God made us sacramental. That doesn’t only refer to the Seven Sacraments of the church—it’s really the other way around: the Sacraments work in and on us with such profundity because we are sacramental. A kiss, a flag, a smile—these things are sacramental, meaningful, carrying their meaning in the things themselves. Feasts, as everything else we do, are sacramental, too.
When we empty life of feasting (and fasting!) we empty it of content. Our Christmas has been gutted because it’s been re-defined by television advertising and a shopping frenzy into a time of saccharine sentimentality about “goodwill to men,” forgetting Gloria in excelsis as politically inconvenient.
The sacramental Christian is called by his very existence, by the fact that God bothered to create him, to suck the marrow-bone of life dry. Live as if you matter. We were made for joy, for feasting (only a feaster can really know how to fast!).
An old Louisiana custom grasps this without bothering to stop and explain. At a Christmastide dinner party the other night, a fun discussion about the tradition of the King’s Cake showed this afresh. We talked about the King’s Cake, a European custom dating back almost a thousand years. Universally it's served up as part of the Epiphanytide celebration—except in Louisiana and south-east Texas. There it’s a custom of Mardi Gras. Why? Because it keeps the Epiphanytide celebrations going to the very last minute, carrying them not beyond, but to the threshold of Lent itself.
We’re made for feasting because we’re made for joy. Epiphanytide lasts till February 4. Keep the feast till then, and “make the angels envious!”—Fr Gregory Wilcox
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