BRIER — The holiday season for most people ended Dec. 26.
For those who adhere to more traditional creeds, however, the season continued up through Jan. 6.
At St. Paul Antiochan Orthodox Church in Brier, Father James Bernstein keeps Holy Theophany an integral part of the church calendar.
“Up to the fifth century, Theophany was considered the greater of the two feasts,” Bernstein said, the second feast being Christmas.
In some regions, both Theophany and Christmas were celebrated on the same day in those early years of the church.
Theophany, or Epiphany, as it’s known in many western Christian traditions, marks the baptism of Jesus and the revelation of the Holy Trinity and that Jesus was the son of God.
Eventually the Christmas holiday was moved to Dec. 25 to coincide with and co-opt the Roman pagan feast of Saturnalia, which was typically held on the longest night of the year and also symbolized rebirth and renewal.
The Feast of Theophany remained in January.
“We still maintain the dignity and importance of the original feast of Theophany/Epiphany,” Bernstein said. “We have not let the commercialism and consumerism of the culture destroy the sacredness of the original feast day.”
At St. Paul, Bernstein led special services the night of Jan. 5 and the morning of Jan. 6. One of the key rituals of the celebration is the “blessing of the waters,” which evokes the baptism of Jesus by St. John the Baptist in the Jordan River.
At the service the night before Theophany, vials of water were blessed, and the holy water then sprinkled and distributed to the congregation.
On Wednesday morning, the congregation went to a nearby stream. A cross was tossed into the water and one of the congregation went in to retrieve it.
“It represents the blessing of nature as the water proceeds to the whole world,” Bernstein said.
“It’s basically an expression that we’re thankful to God for all the elements,” he said, and especially water as essential to life.
In the weeks following the holiday, Father Bernstein visits the homes of the congregation to bless their houses and belongings.
“It’s sort of a baptism of our possessions,” Bernstein said.
St. Paul Antiochan Orthodox Church has about 175 members, many of them young families. Many of them are, like Bernstein himself, converts to Orthodoxy.
Bernstein was raised in a Jewish family in New York, but converted first to Christianity at age 16, and later to Orthodoxy, a process he described in his autobiography, “Surprised by Christ: My Journey from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity.”
Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.
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