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The Twelve Days of Christmas are largely forgotten today. If they are remembered, they’re remembered as a song about “Lord’s a leaping,” and “partridges in a pear tree.” The Twelve Days, December 25-January 5, are the true Christmas, the Christmas not of preparation for a single holiday, but of opening our hearts increasingly to the Absolute, the Ultimate, the Eternal Light of God.
They’re also an invitation to an intensified spiritual awareness. We seek to open further to the Light come into the world in Emmanuel, God-With-Us. And so, the Twelve Days are a journey into prayer. It’s a season set at the beginning of the year that helps deepen our experience with God in the midst of daily life, embracing the sacred in the ordinary tasks of emails and grocery shopping, washing dishes, sitting in staff meetings, and running kids here and here.
At the beginning of the Twelve Days stands the birth of Christ—that great eruption of light into the ordinariness of human life, a slowly expanding fire kindled at the crossroads between East and West, North and South. The end of these Twelve Days hosts the celebration of Epiphany, a word that means “manifestation” in Greek. Epiphany centers on the story of the wise men, or Magi, who journeyed from the east to welcome the Christ.
The Magi stand for those who come to the Light, those awakened by the Light—enlightened in the true sense of the word. They stand for those who return to their daily lives changed, bearers of the Light where ever they may be.
This holiday season, why not soak in this mystery a little longer that most other people do? Why not practice the relevance of the Twelve Days for your interior life?
For help along that path, I’ve prepared a simple and short free ebook with readings for each of the Twelve Days and Christmas Eve. Most of them are short enough to be read in a minute, yet potent enough to provide you with meditative guidance throughout the day. To download, click on the title: The Journey of the Magi: The Twelve Days of Christmas as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Experience of Prayer.
– Chris Erdman is Pastor of University Presbyterian Church in Fresno, California. He teaches courses at the MB Biblical Seminary and Fresno Pacific University and is an Oblate at the New Camaldoli Hermitage (Benedictine) in Big Sur, California, and has authored several books, including Returning to the Center: Living Prayer in a Distracting World and The Journey of the Magi: The Twelve Days of Christmas as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Experience of Prayer. His excellent blog, Awakening the Spiritual Life, may be found at ChrisErdman.com.
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Here is Chris Erdman’s most recent video on prayer in the active life, more videos may be found at ChrisErdman.com:
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