01/06/2022
JAN. 06: On behalf of the Order, we wish everyone a reflective Epiphany: being The Feast Of The Magi (Melchior, Balthazar, and Gaspar).
From The Collects of the Church...
The Collect:
"O God, who by the leading of a Star didst manifest thy only-begotten Son to the Gentiles; mercifully grant that we, which know Thee now by faith, may after this life have the fruition of Thy glorious Godhead; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
The Meditation:
Keynote: "Spiritual Discernment"
"Like the Wise Men of the East who watched the stars, we are all looking for light from above to enlighten our darkness. By faith we believe in the evidence of things not seen, but can we grasp the substance of things hoped for?"
"The Wise Men, led of the Star, came to the stable-cave near Bethlehem, and there they saw a child and its mother. To other eyes, that Child must have appeared as other new-born children. No one hastened to do it reverence, nor comfort the Mother, lying amid the straw. But the Wise Men, taught of a deeper wisdom, saw otherwise as they knelt in that stable; and such gifts as ambassadors bring to kings they offered to the Child lying in the hay, whom the other guests of the crowded inn passed by unnoticed."
"Yet it was the same Child. The difference was in the observers. The Wise Men saw the Divinity hidden behind the veil of new-made flesh. Others saw nothing by the outer form."
"So it is with the sacraments of the Church. Unless we have the seeing eye, taught of the higher illumination, we shall see no more than the hurrying servants saw as they passed through the stable at Bethlehem. We shall see nothing but empty forms in traditional symbolic rituals of the Church. But if we can discern the things of the Kingdom, we shall see that these forms, empty of intellectual or rational content though they be, are ensouled with the Christ-life."
"It was to the great Being now incarnated that the Three Wise Men did reverence, not to the new-born Child the servants saw. So we, in the sacraments, should see the Christ incarnated in symbolism; presented to our consciousness in a form which it can apprehend; working by means of associated ideas to convey to our limited understanding a realization of things which exceed its grasp."
"The Epiphany means the viewing. Let us pray that we may come to the sacraments with the seeing eyes of the Wise Men, discerning the spirit that animates them; and not, with the unheeding eyes of the hurrying servants, seeing nothing but the outer form."
