Jan 4 column

As all are breathlessly aware, January 6^th marks the end of the church’s Christmas season. The 12 days of Christmas end on Epiphany, and it is a Sunday this year. When our girls were little, they loved the name, as they pronounced it as epee-fanny, and the thought of a church word being connected to something rude set them to giggling.

It is an ancient Greek word, literally to shine around. Our word, fantasy is linked to  it. Its religious sense is that the light of the child Jesus extended to visitors from Israel itself. it presaged the opening of a globe to the gospel message.

In ordinary parlance, we speak of an epiphany as a light bulb moment. We have a light suddenly shine on an issue, and we see it more clearly. It feels as if a flash of insight has occurred, or a moment when the pieces suddenly click into place and a solution is discovered.

An epiphany can be unsettling. In a relationship, you catch sight of just a look from your partner and you know, deep inside, that dissolution is approaching, no matter what you do. We enter therapy in the hope that the therapist can catch sight of some crucial incident that explains much of our personal travails. You sit in church and realize that you do not belong there anymore.

We crave an epiphany for something good and momentous. “Could it be? she does love me.” Some folks have the thrilling sense of a vocation, a calling, in their work life. the great paleontologist Stephen Gould knew that he would study dinosaurs when he first walked into the Museum of Natural History near Central Park when he was five years old.

Sometimes, an epiphany is seeing the world in a new way and realizing that you will not ever look at things the same way again. Listen to Mary Swan: “you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything…And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.” 

A Christian may call her sense of things coming together, discernment, or perhaps the prompting of the Holy Spirit. The spirit is a force that is not coerced or manipulated. the spirit alights on it s own timetable. I do think that we can be open to the gentle whispers of the spirit. Far too often, we are so busy, so harried, so resentful that we close off its promptings in the midst of our quest to further our agenda.

A seemingly small thing can be the occasion for epiphany. “Bloom where you are planted” on an old  homemade banner caught my eye once, and it has never left me. I find moments of epiphany in movies, where it is rarely a crucial plot point but an insight that surprises me from the side. At this point, I would like my epitaph to be a piece of Jewish wisdom: “we rarely solve problems, so we hope to help make a better set of problems.” Thomas Merton had a moment of perfect clarity on the corner of 4^th and Walnut in Louisville, where he felt the connections of love to those in his field of vision. So many times, we look out into the world, but get caught up in our own reflection. At tis best, an epiphany shines a clear light on our inner life, on our view of others. We no longer feel out of place, but for a moment or a lifetime, we are at home, at peace.