Epiphany, 2009
Can you imagine if we celebrated this feast with the same fervor as Christmas? Schools would close; Banks would close; people would shop incessantly and prepare large meals. Children would be told all kinds of wondrous stories about when their parents were little and the three Kings came to their house. All over we would hear people talking solemnly about the “real meaning of Epiphany.” But let’s face it; our calendar is already pretty well set. Most holidays just have to learn to live with what they are. Perhaps the best Epiphany can hope for is an Oscar for best holiday in a supporting role.
Why is it that Epiphany doesn’t make the big time? I think it is because we are a culture and a religion that honors propositions over experience. We say in our Eucharistic liturgy, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. These are propositions, take ‘em or leave ‘em. What Epiphany speaks about is subjective, it is about awareness and expanded consciousness. I think we don’t know what to do with that. Propositions allow us to keep a distance and our life pretty much the way it is. Experience changes us!
We don’t know how to value experience, awareness or heightened consciousness. No one gets a raise for any of these things. They are not the stuff of textbooks or typical college curriculums. You certainly can’t put them on your resume.
Yet for all of God’s actions in creation and redemption, without our being conscious of them, without our subjective experience of these actions, all we have is a set of stories and morals to be learned by rote or ignored. It helps explain why people never claim a three-hour football game is too long, but a one-hour church service seems interminable.
Epiphany is about the wonderfully subjective experience of becoming aware of the grace and love that courses through every atom of creation. How we lost that awareness is a story unto itself, but the rediscovery of our real life and our place in the world is the magic of Epiphany. God is making God’s love manifest and people have to rearrange their lives around that awareness.
That God acts is a wonderful thing. But that action is incomplete until we receive that communication. Indeed, we are incomplete until we receive these truths and allow ourselves to be transformed by them.
So Happy Epiphany, May your eyes be truly open to see the light all around you and within you.
