From Season to Season

 And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them,  until it came and stopped over the place where the child was. They were overjoyed at seeing the star,  and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother. They prostrated themselves and did him homage. Then they opened their treasures  and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh .  —Matthew 2:9b-11 When Saint Luke wrote his account of the birth of Jesus, he spoke of shepherds tending their flocks by night. Inspired an angelic messenger and the multitude of the heavenly host with their songs of God’s glory, these shepherds “went in haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger” (Luke 2:16). We hear this story in the gospels proclaimed in the Masses of Christmas “ During the Night ” and “ at Dawn .”    Saint Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus has a very different tone. Concerned as he is with demonstrating how Jesus was the fulfillm...

In his novel, Brideshead Revisited , Evelyn Waugh tells the story of Charles Ryder and the Marchmain family. Near the end of the novel, Ryder has an awakening, an epiphany , as he watches the final act of faith of a man he presumed shared his ambivalence toward Catholicism. Despite himself, Ryder “felt the longing for a sign…the hand moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the Sign of the Cross. Then I knew the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.” In the ancient world, an epiphaneia was a visible manifestation of a god or the solemn visit of a secular ruler to the cities of his realm. Today’s celebration of the Epiphany of the Lord brings together the quiet realizations of a Charles Ryder with the grandeur of a king’s visit. In this liturgy, we are not passively remembering the journey of the Magi—...