Yesterday Brian James, my sponsor in Orthodoxy, texted an invite to my cell phone, buried beneath three layers of cotton as I lay cursing at ice my right hand was scraping from between the undercarriage of my car and its plastic façade.
I’d awoke to a flat tire in nearly subzero temperatures, between Prairie blizzards. Before this Advent’s forty-day fast and the daily readings Brian James had suggested, I would have claimed yesterday just got worse from there. Now, I am beginning to understand these trials enhance my experience of the Divine Liturgy.
Theophany is one of three important feast days in the Orthodox year, alongside Christ’s resurrection and the sending forth of the Holy Spirit through the Apostles. I didn’t even know the meaning going into it, having not yet gotten to January 6th in the two volume explanation of Orthodox’s seasons Brian James 
had sent before my wife and I honeymooned in Israel.
This liturgical service centers on the Messiah’s baptism in the Jordan.
Perhaps what I find most thrilling while participating in an Orthodox liturgy is the vast reference to Old Testament scripture. One leaves the liturgy with no doubt that Christ fulfilled the mythos of his people and that through his example all of humanity has been invited to strive towards fulfillment of their own potential, modeled in Christ.
The etymology of symbol, from the Greek Syn-bole, is to throw two lances together or, as Father Don Hock claimed during my Catechism, “to bring two realities together.”
Orthodox Liturgy is a tradition by which Orthodox Christians revere God as we have for two millenia of growth and refinement.
If you think wine gets sweeter with age, the Be-ing of Christ causes such a jolt of awe that celestial beings tremble! An Orthodox Christian participates in a liturgy that brings the reality of Christ’s acts to his or her immediate sensory input. Liturgy, especially on nights before a Feast, allows each participant to tremble with an awe, brought on by humility, at that in which he or she is participating.
Last night God, wearing a shroud of clay, came to a specific person whom he had created in a specific culture, at a specific point in the story of humanity, and asked this created person to immerse God-Incarnate within the waters of the Jordan.
This created person, John, protested. Logically it is he who should be cleansed by God. John was a man with enough humility that, despite having gained a following worthy of vainglory, he professed being unworthy to help the Messiah’s journey, even by fastening the most loathed of a wandering Jew’s necessary outer-garment.
Last night, God came to this humble John and asked a genetic cousin of God-Incarnate’s shroud to subject God to the ritual of baptism. In doing so, God elevates the Jewish ritual bath from a simile of spiritual cleansing to a metaphor, now with an added syn-bole of participatory communion in the Holy Trinity for all who have been baptized as such. At the same period in humanity’s story, God-incarnate transmuted the waters of the Jordan, gradually quenching the thirst of every living thing. As a participant in the life of the Orthodox Church, I was there to experience it.
Amazing, God bless you.