Sarx

ISTORIANS Discussing the origins of Christmas on the Church’s calendar will sometimes focus on the date itself (not quite the solstice, not quite not the solstice, etc) but I’m rather partial to the work of Fr Thomas Talley, a liturgical scholar and, in retirement, a resident of Asheville, NC, and member of St Mary’s parish. His book, The Origins of the Liturgical Year is one of the seminal works in this area, focusing on the historical evolution of the various celebrations. He tracks the various community celebrations (and the reason for their timings) that evolved into the festivals we celebrate today. He skips over pneumatic reasonings that can’t quite be verified and, like Blessed Alexander Schmemann and Canon Hugh Wybrew, would rather see and track the historical process.

Today is one day when that process (rather than the Holy Spirit, per se) rears its head in the most annual direct form. And it is one day that I rather love. It is interesting: through the historical evolution, it is the Spirit’s action and the Church’s teaching that we see.

In the West, today is the feast of the Epiphany, or manifestation: the day that commemorates the visit of several astrologers to the birthplace of the infant Jesus. The theological import is that here the Jewish Messiah is being worshipped by Gentiles but more – and perhaps most importantly – and it was their own religious traditions that brought them. In the East the title of the feast is “Theophany” and, more clearly, it points to the Manifestation of God. The Gentile religions had in them the logos, the Mind of God, present wherever there was Truth. The Tao te Ching is, for them that can read it right, an “Old Testament” as well. The stars and astrological mindset of the Persians bring them to a place of preparedness, and – as St Justin the Philosopher makes clear, even the philosophical ponderings of Plato and Socrates prepared them for the Gospel. Theophany reveals that truth that they have always known to be Who He Is.

In the Christian Orient, using a different calendar, January 6th is the only feast there is: today is the Nativity and the Theophany all at once. The manifestation of God is, once and for all, accomplished today. Communication between the Roman World and the Orient was so weak that the new-fangled feast of “Nativity” never made the journey that far east before political squabbles killed it outright. They only have the Theophany.

For those hundreds of millions of Eastern Christians using a different Calendar, today is 24 December, Christmas Eve. The entire Christmas/Theophany cycle is preparing to play out again for half the Christian world.

Crossing the streams, East and West, Oriental and Byzantine, Gregorian and Julian, you can see, today and tomorrow, a huge swath of Christian history and theology laid out with all its beautiful and complex patterns made clear and simple by repetition.

This is, really, only a position available for someone in a post-modern, internet connected world. In “the Old Countries” everything is just as it always was. In pockets of hold-out modernist Fundamentalists in the Church various parties fight over the calendar as if it was a matter of Doctrine and Salvation.

But from another point of view (not more enlightebed or “better”, just another) the Internet – a window into the world next door – becomes an Old Testament, an historical preparation offering us a chance to see the Manifestation of God in the overlapping chaos of a liturgical and historical kaleidoscope that suddenly – for two days – manifests an icon of the Nativity.

A blessed feast!