Friday, January 6, was the traditional, immovable date of the Feast of the Epiphany in the liturgical calendar of the Church of Rome, and it was observed as such in much of the Catholic world. But not in the USA: the American Bishops have, since the drastic re-shaping of Catholic life undertaken in the 1970s, moved Epiphany to the Sunday after the Sunday after Christmas, taking it out of the work week and thus removing a former day of obligation for busy Americans.
I was curious about the observance of this feast in Eastern Christendom, and when I poked around for information yesterday I was surprised to learn that Eastern-Rite Catholics, in full communion with the Bishop of 
Rome, observed in their Churches on Friday not the Epiphany of the Lord in Bethlehem, but the THEOPHANY of the Holy Trinity in the River Jordan. Roman Catholics in the United States will observe a parallel commemoration on Monday, the Baptism of the Lord (the Pope in Rome will do so SUNDAY, as he observed Epiphany on Friday.) An interesting conjunction of two different divine -phanies, or “public appearances”: one of the vulnerable infant Savior before the foreign Magi, the other of God as Trinity for the first time to anyone.
I must confess that looking at a Byzantine Catholic liturgical calendar gives me a bad case of feast envy. Twelve obligatory “Great Feasts” in the year, which means, on average, one (inconvenient) weekday of obligation per month. A 70-day super-Lent that is as long as a non-bowl college football season, and longer than the full broadcast run of many television programs. Other seasons of obligatory fasting, including two whole weeks in August preceding the August 15 Assumption (called by Eastern Catholics the “Dormition,” which means something like “slumber”.) A liturgical calendar so busy and demanding and varied, it seems to me, couldn’t help but make it a little bit easier for distracted and over-entertained moderns to order their lives according to the rhythms and seasons of worship.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the strict conformity of life to the liturgical seasons of feasts and fasts will sanctify us, any more than building our lives around college and pro sports seasons, our favorite television programs, and sales at Kohl’s will irreparably darken our spiritual vision.
But Catholic Christians of other centuries and cultures seem to have had much more room in their lives than we do for the shaping forms of liturgical time, and their lived faith seems as a consequence to have had a much greater hold upon them. Those familiar with the novel Kristin Lavransdatter have seen one author’s historically-informed portrayal of such life in medieval Norway, in which preparation for and observance of feasts and fasts are the principal structure of all social and cultural life. And lest the skeptic be quick to dismiss such a portrayal as romantic fiction about a phony, idealized past, one need only consult the first chapter of historian Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 for a more rigorous consideration of the evidence:
Any study of late medieval religion must begin with the liturgy, for within that great seasonal cycle of fast and festival, of ritual observance and symbolic gesture, lay Christians found the paradigms and the stories which shaped their perception of the world and their place in it. Within the liturgy, birth, copulation, and death, journeying and homecoming, guilt and forgiveness, the blessing of homely things and the call to pass beyond them were all located, tested and sanctioned. In the liturgy and in the sacramental celebrations which were its central moments, medieval people found the key to the meaning and purpose of their lives (11).
It is not difficult to understand the importance of the liturgical calendar for late medieval people. There was, in the first place, no alternative, no secular reckoning of time: legal deeds, anniversaries, birthdays were reckoned by the religious festivals on which they occurred…No one could marry during the four weeks of Advent or the six weeks of Lent. Everyone must fast during the forty days of Lent, abstaining not merely from meat but from other animal products, “whitemeats” such as egg and cheese. In addition to Lent, fasting was obligatory on the ember days, that is, the Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays after the feast of St Lucy, Ash Wednesday, Whit Sunday, and the Holy Cross Day. There was also an obligation to fast on the vigils of the feasts of the twelve Apostles…the vigils of Christmas Day, Whit Sunday, the Assumption of Our Lady, the Nativity of John the Baptist, the feast of St Laurence, and the feast of All Saints…There were therefore almost seventy days in the year when adults were obliged to fast. (41)
If that is the way that the LAITY lived in former ages of Christendom, then the strict liturgical ordering even of hourly time in monastic life seems much less of a stretch. For a powerful documentary depiction of this life, see Philip Gröning’s beautiful 2006 film Into Great Silence. For those who don’t have two-and-a-half hours to spare, novelist Martin Mosebach’s 2006 book The Heresy of Formlessness (Ignatius) has a good short chapter on life in a famed French Benedictine monastery:
At first, the visitor may find the Masses and Gregorian Chant an intricate drama, hard to follow. As the day unfolds, however, he discovers in small ways that it is not a drama at all—or rather, that it is a drama that has no end. He discovers that, in this world of the cloister, there is no other life “below the
surface”; there is no trivial world with occasional high points of festal ceremony. The Rule of Saint Benedict, and the way it is translated into life at Fontgombault, aims to prevent any part of life from being bracketed out: instead, the whole day is pronounced to be liturgy. (97)
As a 21st-century American, I recognize that the shape of my life is largely profane, secular, and trivial, with “occasional high points of festal ceremony” like Advent, Christmas, and Easter providing decoration and flavor; sacred time is not the ground and substance of my life. I confess that it is sadly NOT the rhythm of the liturgical calendar that gives form to the passage of time for me and my family. It is rather the academic calendar: I work in education, and with two kids in elementary school, it is the shape of the school year that orders our family life, 
from Academic New Year (mid-August) to the Resurrection (Labor Day), with its long bouts of Ordinary Time, and major observances along the way, such as the Lesser and Greater Ordeals of Occupying the Kids at Home (Thanksgiving and Christmas), the Ascension of Parental Discontent (report cards), and the Dormition of the Intellect (June-July).
I also am compelled to recognize that the form of much of contemporary life is formlessness itself, a stimulating but wearying smear of sound without rhythm, in which anything can happen at any time. Gone is the morning paper, the Sunday night call to relatives, and the weekly trip to the library; in its place are the niche-media Twitter feed, texts to grandma, and indefinite on-line renewal privileges that remove the obligation to show up in person to return the books your kids checked out a year ago. Even once-unshakeable profane rituals like organizing evenings around the television broadcast of sports and entertainment have been dissolved, replaced by DVD sets and on-demand streaming. Again, nothing about all of this is necessarily damning—but such formlessness certainly makes it even more difficult to perceive even the outlines of liturgical time: Epiphany, Easter, and Pentecost become just a few more special events in the rhythmless stream of mundane and profane life, alongside the Super Bowl and spring break. And however we as Catholic Christians may want to order our lives, the way our friends and family actually order theirs can be a powerful force to the contrary.
It would be a novelistic fantasy to expect that one’s family or group of friends could start living life the way the late medieval Christians did, with Ladymas and Candlemas, Corpus Christi processions and the annual Blessing of the Ploughs. But I have the sense that there is a real hunger among young Catholic families in America for more sacred time and sanctified life, with less compartmentalization and “bracketing out” of the sacred. If we start by sanctifying and structuring the day—morning offering, blessing at meals, a traditional “prayer before work”, the noon Angelus, the evening family rosary—then we might be better equipped to sanctify the week through other rituals beyond our Sunday obligation, such as a consistent Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament, meatless Fridays, and a regular daily Mass. Sanctifying and ordering the month, through First Friday devotions and observation of the old “Ember Day” fasts (described here in a wonderful new Phoenix-based blog called “Forgotten Altars”), can take us even closer to the ideal of year-round sacred time.
Again—to do so is no guarantee of sanctity. But to order our lives much as pagan Americans do, with non-stop sports, politics, Hollywood, and fashion taking up a majority of our very limited spiritual bandwidth, to structure our lives as if there were a complete divorce between cult and culture—that, it seems to me, would make difficulties certain.
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Thanks to Magnificat I am sure that more lay people (of all ages) are praying (a simplified version of) the Liturgy of the Hours exemplifying this hunger that you believe to exist. During his Wednesday Audience on Nov. 16th of 2011, Pope Benedict XVI said, “I would like to renew my call to everyone to pray the Psalms, to become accustomed to using the Liturgy of the Hours, Lauds, Vespers, and Compline. Our relationship with God can only be enriched by our journeying towards Him day after day.”