Father Rutler: Epiphany and Contemplating the Stars

Fr. George W. Rutler

When The New Yorker magazine was peerless for its combination of erudition and wit, it ran a cartoon of Lilliputians contemplating Gulliver, whom they had fastened to the ground with ropes: “Either he’s very big or we are very small.”
 

That is what we might say of the Creator when Epiphany directs our eyes to the stars. But while man must be humbled by the size beyond measure of the galaxies, the Creator does not humiliate us. In an interview in 1930, Einstein said: “We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how.” With the humility of a scientist who knows that there is much he does not know, that same professor wryly remarked to R. A. Thornton that he did not want to be like someone, including so many physicists, “who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest.”
 

Well-meaning scientists have tried to calculate a physical explanation for the Star of Bethlehem. In 1604, Johannes Kepler proposed that at the time of Christ’s birth there was a supernova simultaneous with the conjunction of the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. This often is a feature of Christmas programs in astronomical observatories. There may be something to that, but saints like Chrysostom were of the opinion that this was no ordinary phenomenon, given the way it moved and came close to earth, but was “of some power endowed with reason.” For Aquinas, it is “probable that it was a newly created star, not in the heavens, but in the air near the earth, and that its movement varied according to God’s will.”
 

Little is known of the Magi, and for that reason they are a mine easily plundered by romantics who make them so exotic that they seem too good to be true.  We do not even know their homeland; perhaps it was Persia or, according to one recent theory, what is now Yemen. We do know that God, unlike Gulliver, is beyond measure, and his grace has made us more than Lilliputians. Saint Hippolytus, before dying a hard death for Christ, said of him:

He wanted us to consider him as no different from ourselves, and so he worked, he was hungry and thirsty, he slept. . . . When we have come to know the true God, both our bodies and our souls will be immortal and incorruptible. We shall enter the kingdom of heaven, because while we lived on earth we acknowledged heaven’s King. Friends of God and co-heirs with Christ, we shall be subject to no evil desires or inclinations, or to any affliction of body or soul, for we shall have become divine.

Feast of the Epiphany

We Three Kings of Orient Are - Robert Shaw Chamber Singers

"O God, Who by the guidance of a star didst this day reveal Thine only-begotten Son to the Gentiles, mercifully grant that we, who know Thee now by faith, may be so led as to behold with our eyes the beauty of Thy majesty. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen."

~Collect for the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Father Rutler: "All Lives that Truly Encounter Christ are Changed"

A weekly column by Father George Rutler.

The Twelve Days of Christmas end with the celebration of the visit of the Wise Men to the Holy Child. This “Epiphany” is the showing of Christ to those who were foreign to Judaism. Very little is said of the Wise Men, and we cannot even be sure that there were just three. It may have taken them upwards of two years to make the journey, and — given their familiarity with the Jewish scriptures and astronomy — they probably were Zoroastrians, monotheists who were open to the wisdom and writings of other religions. They would have been wealthy and influential in a culture that esteemed high learning. They certainly were wise in being able to detect the cunning of King Herod. Their saga is so exotic that it is the very stuff of romance, which makes it difficult to believe that they really existed. Yet they were very much a part of the nativity narrative and were the first to take the unwritten Gospel to distant places.

In “The Journey of the Magi,” T. S. Eliot portrays them as utterly changed by what they saw and more than uncomfortable with their homeland — present-day Iran — when they went back:

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

All lives that truly encounter Christ are changed. The sublime and most potent examples of that are the saints, heirs of the Wise Men. Pope Benedict XVI canonized some of them this past year as models for what he has called the New Evangelization.

Father Jacques Berthieu, who died in 1896 at age 57, was a French Jesuit missionary martyred in Madagascar. Pedro Calungsod, who died in 1672 at 17, was a Filipino lay catechist martyred in Guam. Father Giovanni Piamarta, an Italian priest who died in 1913 at 71, counted among his works the establishment of technical training schools for disadvantaged youths. Marianne Cope, who died in 1918 at age 80, had come from her native Germany to upstate New York and, as a Franciscan nun, worked among the lepers in Hawaii with St. Damian. Kateri Tekakwitha was an Algonquin-Mohawk who suffered much for the Faith she embraced and died in 1680 at the age of 24. Anna Schäffer, who died in 1925, spent over half of her 43 years in her Bavarian home as an invalid with mystical gifts as a visionary and miracle worker.

Like the Magi, these saints were never able to call their old home their true home, for they set their sights on their promised home in Heaven, and that hope made them all the more useful in this world. “Hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).

From the Pastor - Let Your Light Shine

A weekly column by Father George Rutler.

The Feast of the Epiphany is transferred from January 6 to this Sunday, and the following day celebrates the Baptism of Our Lord. Each is about the shedding of light. The Magi were guided by a star, and at the Baptism a light was seen in the sky as a voice disclosed the divinity of Christ. The Baptism of Christ is one of the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary because of its Light which is “grace and truth” (John 1:14).

For physical life to last at all there must be light from the sun, and for spiritual life to last forever there must be an entrance into the Light of the World. St. John the Apostle marveled at how the spiritual Light became perceptible through the Incarnation: “Something which has existed since the beginning, that we have heard, and we have seen with our own eyes; that we have watched and touched with our hands: the Word who is life” (1 John 1:1). The Magi saw this in His infancy, and a large crowd saw it on the banks of the Jordan, but the infant and the man were the same Son of God, whose divine nature has no nursery beginning or elderly end.

  

All saints are like St. John the Baptist in that they were “not the Light, but came to testify to the Light” (John 1:8). Just as created light beams through seven primary colors, so the Light of the World radiates through the seven Sacraments to produce saints. Our Holy Father has approved the required second miracle in each instance for several saints to be canonized in the year 2012. Among them are two New Yorkers: Kateri Tekakwitha, daughter of an Algonquin mother and a Mohawk father in the seventeenth century, and Marianne Cope, a German immigrant to Utica who worked in a factory to support her family after her father became ill, and who died in Hawaii where she worked with lepers along with another saint, Father Damian. These new saints are not to be gazed upon as curious prodigies, for they guide us on our own path to the spiritual luminosity St. Paul described: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

Each Mass ends with the marching orders: “Go forth.”  Exit from church is entrance into everything else. “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). In the new year, a Christian should resolve to bring at least one other person into that light. For all the marvels he had seen, St. John was not content until he had shared what he had seen: “We are writing this to you to make our own joy complete” (1 John 1:4). 

Feast of the Epiphany

20 K+M+B 10

"From the east came the Magi to Bethlehem to adore the Lord; and opening their treasures they offered precious gifts: gold for the great King, incense for the true God, and myrrh in symbol of His burial."

Today's Feast of the Epiphany, also known as "Little Christmas," and "Twelfth Night," concludes the twelve days of Christmas. Of the many celebrations of the Christmas season and this special day commemorating the arrival of the Magi, the Polish "Festival of the Star" is as beautiful as any to be found in Christian tradition.

On the Feast of the Epiphany in Poland, the parish priest visits homes, blesses them, and using chalk writes over door lintels the initials of the three wise men - KMB (Kasper, Melchior and Balthazar) - with the prayerful hope that the family will be spared misfortune in the new year.

The Polish carols, "Gdy Sie, Chrystus Rodzi" (When Christ is born) and Medrcy Swiata (Three Wise Men) are a beautiful commemoration of this day signifying that Jesus came to redeem not only his own people, but the whole world.

A Homily by Father Franklyn M. McAfee - "They Submitted Themselves to the Light, Wherever It Might Lead"

Homily of Reverend Franklyn M. McAfee, D.D.

Pastor Emeritus

St. John the Beloved Catholic Church

McLean, Virginia

January 6, 2008

Russian Orthodox Celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany

The Final Liturgy of Christmas - The Feast of Epiphany

January 6

This video, part of a series presenting the Russsian Orthodox liturgy for the Feast of the Epiphany, features the Moscow Chamber Choir and the Monastery Choir of Trinity St Sergius accompanying the Epiphany procession at the Monastery of New Jerusalem, and the great blessing of the waters.

"Praise the name of the Lord" (Cristov)

Praise ye the name of the Lord
Praise Him, O ye servants of the Lord
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
Blessed is the Lord from Zion
Who dwelleth in Jerusalem
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia

O give thanks unto the Lord
For He is good
And His mercy endureth for ever
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia

O give thanks unto the God of heaven
His mercy endureth for ever
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia