You might or might not know that January 1 was not always the feast of Mary the Mother of God/World Day of Peace on the RC calendar. In fact, that ‘s a quite recent development. Up to the revision of the calendar, 1/1 was celebrated as the Circumcision of the Lord. Which it still is in the East, both Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Why they changed that is really beyond me – an act that further separates the West from the East, stripping the day of an ancient remembrance, in the midst of a reform that was supposed to be all about re-emphasizing the ancient with, we might add, a dash of an eye to deeper Christian unity. Makes no sense.

Over at Mere Comments, Anthony Esolen reflects on the importance of the former designation, and the reality it celebrates.

All the ancient writers saw a connection between circumcision and baptism, and if we were but indifferent anthropologists with a healthy respect for a culture far removed from our own, we might see it too.  Consider the first commandment given to man in Eden: "Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it."  It is not, "Till these fields" or "Build that temple" or "Burn that incense."  It is, simply, that we should live and bring more of ourselves into the light; the love of man and wife is thus allowed its sublime and holy role in creation.

     But after the fall, when God calls Abraham to make of him a great nation, and to use that nation as the means of bringing salvation to the world, He requires His worshipers to mark themselves as belonging to Him.  Thus the command that males should be circumcised: in the very organ of reproduction, of begetting, the Hebrew male is maimed, so to speak, as a sign that his own existence and the existence of all those who might be begotten from his loins are gifts from God, who alone is the Begetter.  All life comes from God, and so the act that begets new life must be considered especially holy; it is absurd to hold that God can command what we do with coats or gold or oxen, but that He must leave to our own discretion what we do with that conferred power to bring more incarnate souls into being.  Hence the laws in the Torah regarding sexual cleanliness — laws that the inattentive and scornful consider so foolish.

     But circumcision is to baptism as the old law is to the new.  Circumcision is a ritual maiming, scored upon the body; baptism is a drowning, a death, a renewal of the soul.  Under the old law Jesus shed his first drops of blood for our redemption — a foreshadowing of the blood he will shed in the new covenant upon the Cross.  Circumcision marks the flaw in man, a bloody flaw, that reaches to the heart of his being; and he is as helpless as a baby to do anything on his own about it.  The death marked by baptism, a baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, washes the blood away, and man is as helpless as a baby to do anything on his own about that, either.