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epiphany 2007
Jan. 6th, 2007 12:04 pmJanuary 6th remains one of my favorite Christian feasts because it encodes so prettily two ways of making a metaphor out of what is presented as a biography (and anomaly me no anomalies; just as societies that have no word for "art" make things we would call art, all those hybrid genre "lives of" in classical antiquity function like biographies, the Gospels included).
The Western Church chose to end the twelve archetypally chosen days of Christmastide with the visit of the Magi, worldly wisdom from a distant culture confirming the improbable disclosure of divine inbreaking; the Eastern Church chose to celebrate the Baptism in the Jordan instead, skipping three eventless decades of getting ready so as to get right to the point of the story in one concise set of festivals.
Actually, as the NY Times reminds us with the Armenian Church's celebration of the Holy Birth, this is not the complete historical story; Armenia elides Birth and Baptism so as to present a seamless Theophany, and these days the Old Calendarists have muddled up the sequence of events because their December 25 falls on our January 7, making this weekend a supreme second chance for everybody who didn't get their Christmas e-cards sent. I used to claim January 19 as the cutoff date on the grounds that any Old Calendarist also celebrating Old Christmas would do so on that date, new style.
I have many laboriously edifying lessons I could draw from all of this, but I prefer, as always, to let you draw your own conclusions. As in the cartoon strip from my childhood that featured a final panel that was blank except for those words and a picture of a cartoonist's pen.
Happy Epiphany, y'all.
The Western Church chose to end the twelve archetypally chosen days of Christmastide with the visit of the Magi, worldly wisdom from a distant culture confirming the improbable disclosure of divine inbreaking; the Eastern Church chose to celebrate the Baptism in the Jordan instead, skipping three eventless decades of getting ready so as to get right to the point of the story in one concise set of festivals.
Actually, as the NY Times reminds us with the Armenian Church's celebration of the Holy Birth, this is not the complete historical story; Armenia elides Birth and Baptism so as to present a seamless Theophany, and these days the Old Calendarists have muddled up the sequence of events because their December 25 falls on our January 7, making this weekend a supreme second chance for everybody who didn't get their Christmas e-cards sent. I used to claim January 19 as the cutoff date on the grounds that any Old Calendarist also celebrating Old Christmas would do so on that date, new style.
I have many laboriously edifying lessons I could draw from all of this, but I prefer, as always, to let you draw your own conclusions. As in the cartoon strip from my childhood that featured a final panel that was blank except for those words and a picture of a cartoonist's pen.
Happy Epiphany, y'all.
