The Sacred Year: Celebrating Epiphany and Re-enchanting the Year through the Liturgical Calendar

By Annie Crawford

In this ongoing series, Annie Crawford, Senior Fellow at the Society for Women of Letters, explores the theological and symbolic significance of the liturgical calendar and discusses how Christians might incorporate celebrations of it into their everyday lives. In this inaugural installment of The Sacred Year, Annie examines the feast of Epiphany Lent and shares her personal reflections and recommendations.

Our mission at the Shadowlands Dispatch is to participate in the re-enchantment of the West. One of the most important ways we can renew the meaning and beauty of the world is by living into the church calendar. The liturgical cycle of sacred holy days unites in one glorious and unending story both the meaning of nature and the salvation of Christ, helping us to renew the marriage between heaven and earth and fill our world with the truth and goodness of God.

The liturgical calendar shows us how each year the earth itself participates in Christ’s death and resurrection, falling into the cold death of winter and rising wondrously back to life as the green blades burst through the hard ground once again. The Gospel story comes to earth not only in the life of Jesus over two thousand years ago, not only in the story of Christ’s church, not only in our individual salvation, but also in the order of nature and the unfolding of the cosmos.

Genesis 1:14 tells us that God created the “lights in the expanse of the heavens” both “to separate the day from the night” and to “be for signs and for seasons” (ESV). It is not pagan to believe God created the earth and sky with divine meaning; it is pagan to believe the earth and sky created God.

Although in one sense, the story begins with the Feast of the Annunciation, the day Christ first entered into our world hidden within Mary’s womb, still the first Sunday of Advent is officially the first day of the liturgical year. Appropriately, the salvation story begins at the end of fall, when the old world is dying and slipping into darkness, revealing our desperate need for a savior to rescue us from sin and death, to bring us a new life and a new hope. 

As the sun moves toward its winter solstice, we see the light dying. In the darkening of our December days each year, we experience the doom of death closing around us. The farther north we live, the more poignant our experience. Then, at the darkest moment of the year, around winter solstice, the Light of Life is born on Christmas day, fulfilling the promise of Isaiah 9:2: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.”

For twelve days, in the fullness of the tribes of Israel and the Apostles of Christ, we celebrate the coming of Immanuel, God with us, as we watch the Light begin to cast out our sin and the days slowly grow again.

As the sun makes his return from the north back toward the median of the sky, so the church remembers that the Son of God walked the earth and also prepared to be lifted high. On this first equinox, the sun’s rays begin to strike the northern hemisphere directly overhead. It is the beginning of spring—the time of planting, when the first green shoots of new life emerge from the cold earth. Spring is the rebirth of life promised months ago by the sun’s solstice return.

The lights in the expanse of the heavens and the earth itself tell us it is the time of Easter, the time to celebrate Good Friday, when God sowed Himself as the Seed of Life into the ground of death, and Easter, when Jesus rose like a green shoot from dry ground, the first fruit of resurrection life. It is the moment when the days flip from darker than light to lighter than dark. Easter is the inversion of the world, the final overthrow of darkness and the inauguration of the Kingdom of Life and Light. The heavens declare this glory.

But we get ahead of ourselves. Today, January 6, is the feast of Epiphany, the end of Christmas and the beginning of Christ’s revelation to the Gentile world. We have a long road to walk before we arrive at the terror and ecstasy of the Triduum at Easter Week.

While the West celebrates the beginning of Epiphany with Three Kings Day and the revelation of Jesus to the Gentile Magi, and the East celebrates Epiphany (also called Theophany) with the revelation of Jesus as the Son of God in his baptism, together all Christendom rejoices in the public revelation of Christ to the world. The light has come and revealed himself to all people!

The meaning of the seasons embodied in the liturgical calendar is not merely something to know or think about; it is a reality we are called to participate in. To celebrate Epiphany and press into the re-enchantment of January, I have a few suggestions.

To start simple, buy or bake a classic King Cake, move the Magi from your nativity set over to the manger of Christ (you haven’t done that yet, right?!), chalk your front door, bless the waters, or consider a few other meaningful ideas from this post at the The Parenting Passageway.

For the literary, read or watch Shakespeare’s Epiphany play, Twelfth Night, paying attention to the motifs of excess, impropriety, disguises, reversals, and inversions. Epiphany is a time when the world is turned upside down: God has become man, the virgin gave birth, the king became poor, pagans worship at the feet of a Jewish child, and the darkness has turned to light. In the medieval traditions of Europe, Epiphany celebration became a time of carnival celebration where rich and poor, men and women alike all feasted together with abandon before the austerities of Lent. Shakespeare plays with all these themes in this festival comedy. 

Finally, as you prepare for the New Year, check out this beautiful 2024 planner designed by Sacred Ordinary Days that walks you through the liturgical year to help you pray through and organize your own personal year.

Throughout 2024 at the Shadowlands Dispatch, I will be sharing more reflections, art, and resources that can help you live into the church calendar and rediscover the meaning of the world around you.

Happy Epiphany! I pray you take some time to join the Magi as they behold the meaning of the stars above and kneel in worship at the feet of their Maker.

—Annie Crawford is a cultural apologist and classical educator with a Master of Arts in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Christian University. She teaches apologetics and humanities courses and is co-founder of The Society for Women of Letters where she serves as Senior Fellow. She has written for Salvo, The Symbolic World, Circe Institute, The Worldview Bulletin, Classical Academic Press, and An Unexpected Journal. Learn more at anniecrawford.net.