If you look up the word epiphany in Wikipedia, one of the entries you’ll find is author James Joyce’s use of the term. This is how he defined it in terms of what he was doing in his stories. An epiphany, he said, is, and I’m quoting here,
...a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether from some object, some scene, some event, or some memorable phase of the mind, the manifestation of which is out of proportion to the significance of whatever produces it.
I love this idea when applied to our lives, that all the time life is presenting us with objects, with events, with people, with circumstances, that manifests something that resides deep down in the spiritual heart of things. For the three Magi, that event, that person was a little baby born to peasant parents in an animal stall that somehow allowed them to see or to sense the fundamental dignity and beauty, the image of God, that all human beings by God’s grace possess.
For you and for me, all this time later, on the Feast of the Epiphany, it’s the very same thing, but also for us as we live in the season of Epiphany. It’s other events, other people, and other circumstances. It’s the comradery of family and friends. It’s the freshness of nature even and especially when our weather is overcast and cold and even rainy. It’s encounters with people who are not like us, encounters that can surprise and delight us in ways we hadn’t imagined. It’s even strangely in some of the health challenges that we can face. It can even be the circumstance that no one wishes to experience, the death of someone we love. All of these things can disclose and reveal the graciousness that we believe that is of God.
Epiphany. May we be able to behold or sense the spiritual realities that live and burn deep down in the heart of things.
