Today January 1

Happy New Year, everybody! Today is the feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord Jesus Christ, now known as the Solemnity of Our Lady. That was always a part of this feast, even when it was called the Circumcision; "it is, to begin with, the octave of Christmas, and -- possibly as a consequence of this -- a special commemoration is made of the Virgin Mother whose pre-eminent share in the mystery could not adequately be recognized on the feast itself." - Butler's Lives. And of course, it is a feast of Joseph, too. "On the 8th day, the child was circumcised. By that time we may hope, they had moved out of the cave into a house, as Bethlehem emptied again after the census. The rite was probably performed by Joseph. It was a father's privilege." - theologian Frank Sheed.

It was a sacrament of the Old Law, one that marked them as a people set apart, kind of like our baptism which superseded it. It was something more solemn -- or at least less joyful, than our baptism -- and even in the early Church days (for this is an ancient feast), there was a desire to make it kind of a day of penance. But New Year's Day? Are they kidding? It was a huge pagan feast -- a huge secular feast, and all the world was partying. As the great Augustine said, it was hopeless to impose a general fast upon an occasion which was a holiday for the rest of the world. So a Christian holiday supplanted it.

And I've often wondered about the nature of the old sacrament. I mean, why the foreskin? And Frank Sheed set me straight: "By the command God gave to Abraham, every male child must undergo circumcision. It is a rite not restricted to the Jews, practised for all sorts of reasons, religious and non-religious, by many peoples. But for the Jews its meaning was wholly religious: it was the consecration to God of man's greatest power in the physical order, the power by which he shares with God in the generation of new life."

Happy New Year's Day, everybody!