The Feast of the Theophany is called the third greatest feast of the Orthodox Church. Certainly, as an Anglo-Catholic, that middle way between East and West, I understood the Feast of the Epiphany (a Greek word meaning "coming to light") to be a very high holy day of obligation. Solemn High Masses would be celebrated at all churches of that tradition on January 6. Twelfth Night continues to be a significant Anglo-Catholic observance.

After being received into the Roman Catholic Church I arose the morning after the Twelfth Day of Christmas with a sense of anticipation. I went down to my parish church early to give myself time to pray before the solemn procession began. But the church was locked. I looked for a sign announcing when the Mass would be celebrated, perhaps later that day. But there was no sign. I called the diocese secretary, who told me (with a note of incredulity in her voice), "There will be no Masses at any churches today."

This surprised me .... and subdued me. But I would be more surprised on another January 6, this time joyfully, when I fully comprehended what this feast means to the Eastern Church. Anyone visiting a well-established Orthodox Church on this day is bowled over .... or should I say, "carried along on a flood." For the priests soak the church sweeping all those around them with torrents of holy water. A high feast on the scale of Great Pascha or the Nativity? It feels to be all of that! And this experience sent me off into wonder. I was filled with wonder from the sheer spiritual power and outpouring of jubilation all around me. But I also wondered: I wondered about the feasts of the Epiphany, of the Lord's Baptism, of the Theophany, of the Great Illumination .... it was said to be all of these things and all at the same time.

Good Heavens! I thought to myself, "This feast is the confluence of many holy waters! Somehow I have stumbled into the center of the universe. And, this brings us to that other meaning of the word epiphany — which is "a fleeting moment in the midst of darkness and confusion when everything is understood aright," when the entire world is seen with brilliant clarity in evanescent flickerings of Divine simplicity.

St. John Chrysostom wrote that the Feast of the Baptism / Theophany commemorates the moment when Jesus "sanctified the nature of the waters" (Discourse 37, "On the Baptism of Christ"). Surely, then, this feast must be a commemoration of a commemoration. For the Lord's Baptism commemorates His original and primal sanctification of waters recorded in the first two sentences of Genesis. Now there is a flood of waters that is all-encompassing, overwhelming, earth-shaking, and transfiguring — the sublime, ungovernable void wrought into a delicate beauty and life-giving motion. And for what reason? By reason of His Almighty Goodness and Love. For in this darkness, in this chaos, He prepares a place for us, a signature act of God. And He forms an inspiring path of life through this beauty towards Himself.

He sanctifies the primal waters granting them a Divine nature by breathing His Own Name upon them, the Eternal Word, as He would later create His Church by breathing on the Disciples: "Receive the Holy Spirit" (Jn 20:22).

He rules the winds and waves, another signature act of God, to impose order and to decree balance that a human lifeworld might be made. Now, go out into the void of outer space visiting one spinning, dead rock after another (at stupendous monetary cost, we might add). Sample one after another their inhospitable atmospheres and intolerable temperatures and dead landscapes and you will marvel, as many scientists do. You will marvel at our living Earth, unique in all the universe.

I say living, for its capacity to right itself, to reconstitute itself, to re-create itself even in a vacuum, recovering its balance of life, has given rise to a name. It is called the Gaia hypothesis, which

Nothing is like it .... as no one and nothing could be anything like Him. He has done it in His creative freedom, has brought about the impossible and the inimitable with a skill and art beyond all imagining and all for His love of us. He sent His Son the first time to prepare a place for us, creating an Eden out of dark chaos, announcing an antitype to a phrase we would hear again: "I go and prepare a place for you" (Jn 14:3). He prepared a place for us from many waters, then, immediately, "Light!" (Gen 1:3). From darkness and void to life-giving waters and light. Here in the briefest thumbnail sketch is the history of the world: water and light vs. chaos and darkness.

When we in our freedom had strayed, seeking rather our own flesh and each others over God's marvelous light, He prepared a second gift of many waters for us, a Great Flood to cleanse the earth. For the human imagination had become fastened upon depravity, "every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Gen 6:5), withering to a point of moral extinction. And the Lord God drew back down the chaos and ungovernable seas that He might create His astonishing lifeworld yet a second time.

Anthropologists studying ritual propose the mikveh bath, described in Leviticus 15, to be the predecessor of St. John the Forerunner's Baptism. The mikveh is an ablution signaling restoration of ritual cleanness, say, if one had been near a corpse or touched by menstrual blood or semen. The bath was done alone in a private and might be repeated following each new instance of ritual impurity. It was obligatory and perfunctory, not very different from a ritual washing of hands. For example, had the priest or Levite stopped to give succor to the man who had been beaten and left to die on the Jericho Road as the good Samaritan had done (Lu 10:25-37), each would have been obliged to perform this ritual cleansing that same evening.

It should be obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that the Baptism of the Forerunner was nothing like this. It was very public. It was preceded by a confession of life and sincere regret, even repentance, for ones betrayals to God. It was life-changing. And it was an unrepeatable act, which heralded an entirely new creation, be it man or woman. To the first-century world into which Jesus was born, the Flood of Noah would have been seen as the great predecessor to the Baptism of St. John the Forerunner.

John's baptism was a tsunami that swept over the entire Jewish Levant. In our earliest account, the Gospel of St. Mark, we read that

St. John's Baptism would continue to exert a powerful hold on the Jewish imagination at least for many decades.

When Apollos arrived from Alexandria to serve St. Paul's apostolate during the 50s A.D., he was evidently, however unwittingly, a devotee of "John-Baptistism" and had to be extensively tutored in the Christian faith by Prisca and Aquila. At least a half-century following the Baptist's imposing appearance in Palestine, St. John the Theologian was still wrestling with the widespread misimpression that the Forerunner was the Messiah, devoting nearly half the words of his Prologue to the subject.

The words St. John chooses afford us a glimmer of insight:

In his Second Letter, St. Peter calls Noah the "eighth person" (2 Peter 2:5, King James translation) revealing the Man of the Flood in resurrection light. Recall that the Eighth Day is the first day of the New Creation following the resurrection. Christians were baptized in eight-sided baptismal fonts in the Early Church. And this connects our dots: from the dark, increate waters of Genesis and a brilliant light, sanctifying the nature of water, and pointing forward thousands of years later to a Baptism that will occasion the second revelation of the Holy Trinity to the Earth: from Theophany to Theophany, deep calling unto deep (Ps 42:7), and thence to resurrection light. For the Holy Spirit hovering over the waters and the Dove bearing a sprig of the Second Creation, returning to Noah, now descends upon the Son of God at His Baptism, upon the Creative Word, upon Life Itself, bearing a sprig of the Kingdom of Heaven — Almighty, Omnipotent, Sovereign Life erasing death, as surely as the Sun scatters shadows. (What is death?) His gift to us is His Life.

Truly, our Great High Feast today is the confluence of many waters. It is the center of the world. It is the water that is light and the light that is life. For He came into the world, but the world knew Him not. And He came unto His own, but His own received Him not. But to those who received Him,