Soul Sister Time

            Today is Epiphany.   On January 6 the church celebrates the Feast of Epiphany.   Protestants don’t normally think about it; the Western church attaches Epiphany to the Wise Men who searched out Jesus after His birth.   The Eastern church focuses on the baptism of Jesus when He was revealed as the Son of God as the Epiphany.               For me it has become the day that I finally turn off the Christmas lights that have brightened the dark world during the Christmas season.   After all the effort to get them up, I hate to take them down right after Christmas.   I wait the full twelve days after Christmas until Epiphany to carry out the sad but by now much needed task.   After all, I say I put them up partly as my Christmas Greeting to my neighbors.   I think they are very tired of them by January.   ...

            With all the commotion of Christmas, it would be easy to let the Feast of Epiphany (January 6) and its short season (January 7-February 21) before Lent begins to slip away between the two major festivals of the church (Christmas and Easter).   It would be a shame to do so, as Fr. Thomas Keating points out: Epiphany is the crowning feast of Christmas.   We tend to think of Christmas as the greater feast, but in actual fact, it is only the beginning.   It whets our appetite for the treasure to be revealed in the feasts to come.   The great enlightenment of the Christmas-Epiphany Mystery is when we perceive that the divine light manifests not only the son of God has become a human being, but that we are incorporated as living members into his body.   This is the special grace of Epiphany. [i]             I forced my husband to leave the undeco...