SOLEMNITY OF THE EPIPHANY
JANUARY 6th 2026
AT QUARR ABBEY
As the great feast of Easter has only one set of antiphons for Lauds and Vespers, the solemnities of Christmastide have quite a range of them, from the first Vespers of Nativity until the Baptism of our Lord. All the antiphons of this season are beautiful ones, and they sing marvelously.
If the main word of All Saints Day is alacriter, a latin adverb which says the bouncing joy of all the elect around the Lamb of God, it is the adverb ineffabiliter, which we sang so often in the hymn for Vespers about the Word of God, Ex Patre Patris Unice, Solus ante principium, Natus ineffabiliter, the Word, “born ineffably of the Father, as the Unique of the Father, the single One before the beginning”. It is difficult to translate that ineffabiliter: it means that it is not possible to express perfectly how the Word of God, who is God himself, was born before all beginning. Ineffable says that something cannot be expressed by words. We remember what saint Paul writes in his Letter to the Romans: “We do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (8, 26). When you cannot “word” something, you have three possibilities: to sigh, or to sing, or to remain into a deep silence.
On the solemnity of the Mother of God, which opens the New Year, an antiphon sings very well the mystery: Quando natus es ineffabiliter ex Virgine, tunc impletæ sunt Scripturæ, “When you were born ineffably from the Virgin, then the Scriptures are fulfilled”. Our first ineffabiliter concerned the eternal Nativity of the Word from the Father; the second one sings his Nativity from the Virgin Mary. Both cannot be expressed by our languages.
That is why we must sing. Saint Augustin in one of his beautiful homilies says that when the harvesters have a good crop, they are very happy; they speak together about it, but their joy growing, they start singing, as the Angels did when announcing the great joy of the Nativity to the shepherds.
Today in this Solemnity of the Epiphany, another language is used: that of the light, with the star guiding Magi to the crib. We hear it in Psalm 18:
“The heavens declare the glory of God
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
There is no speech, nor are there words
whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world”
(1.3.4).
A very ancient tradition in humanity speaks of the stars as if they had a language and even as if they were playing something as a music. They called it “Harmony of spheres”: they regarded the movements of celestial bodies – sun, moon, planets and stars – as a form of music, a kind of dance through the immensity of the Universe. Venit lumen tuum and Stella ista: these two antiphons sing how Magi are guided to Bethlehem in their long pilgrimage to the King of Israel and of all the nations, a sort of procession accompanied by the music of the stars.
There is a mystery in music, a language before words and after words. Wisdom sang a a prelude to the Creation. Words cannot say what music is able to make you feel and understand. Such an incapacity of words is astonishing “in regard to a phenomenon of so manifest and universal a reality as music, to a phenomenon without which, for innumerable men and women, this plagued earth and our transit on it would probably be unbearable” (George Steiner, Errata, p. 65). Music and dance are closer to the “unknown of creation” (p. 67). The singing voices join music and words: “Song leads us home to where we have not yet been” (p. 67).
That is why, singing, we go on walking with the Magi and all the Church, looking at the star, when our Pope Leo XIV has just closed the holy door at this end of the Holy Year 2025, the door opened by Pope Francis: it is not the end of our pilgrimage, but, comforted in our hope, we start again, singing, walking…