Glory to Jesus Christ. I'm Mother Natalia, a Byzantine Catholic nun from Christ the Bridegroom

Monastery and this is Pines with Aquinas. I'd like to start by sharing with you a little bit

about the Feast of Theophony.

So in the East, we have this celebration on January 6th,

and it's the celebration of the baptism of our Lord in the Jordan by St. John the Baptist.

And the feast itself is on January 6th, but we have this pre-Festive period starting January 2nd and after the feast

we have a post-Festive period that goes until January 14th because Byzantine's

basically just like to make everything longer and so we have a ton of prayers about the Theophony in this time period.

We're actually, as I'm recording this, though not as this comes out, we're still in this post-festive period, so I'm recording this though not as this comes out we're still in this post-defested

period so I'm still kind of in the midst of just being surrounded by all of these prayers

at all of our services about about the Lord's baptism.

Something that I think is really interesting about this feast is

there's a much greater celebration than there is for the Feast of the

Nativity or for Christmas.

And you know as Catholics I think we just kind of have our minds focused on Christmas and

Easter but but, actually we spend way more hours in the chapel for the

Feast of Theophony at the monastery and in the Byzantine tradition and there is this what's called the great

blessing of water which is more than a regular blessing of water I guess and it

takes I don't know like 30 or 40 minutes and then every year for

Theophony we we go around the tradition as you have your house blessed so we

have our monastery blessed and

and so on and so forth and and the tradition is you would also

...