Epiphany/epiphany

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I want to talk this morning about Epiphany—January 6th—and also about epiphanies spelled with a lower case “e”: those “ah-ha” experiences where things suddenly become clear—or clearer. First, and briefly, the orthodox holiday: 

Nowadays most of us think of the Christmas Season as running from Thanksgiving through December twenty-fifth—even through New Year’s Day. Historically—before all the commercial activity got tacked on to it—Christmas ran from December 6, St. Nicolas Day, through Twelfth Night, which also known as Epiphany, and always celebrated on January sixth. 

Unitarian Universalists, as a rule, do not pay much attention to the intricacies of the Christian liturgical calendar, but the theologian in me always enjoys cracking open these metaphors and seeing—in this-worldly humanistic terms—what’s revealed. 

Capital “E” Epiphany actually commemorates three separate events: the visit by the Magi being only one of them. Alan Watts, in his [Beacon Press published] Myth and Ritual in Christianity shares several legends about the three Magician-Kings depicted in the Book of Matthew. Tradition represents them as Chaldean or Persian astrologers, Zoroastrian sages, or as kings representing the three races of the ancient world: black, yellow, and white. Their gifts: symbols appropriate to any universal redeemer: as king, the gold of tribute; as God, the incense of worship; as Sacrificial Victim, myrrh for embalming the body. According to the author of Matthew, no sooner had the Magi departed than the Holy Family followed suit: fleeing to Egypt and away from Herod’s wrath. And so… with Jesus’ birth accomplished and the future savior out of harm’s way, another Christmas Season ends.  

I always like to think of the wise men in more modern garb: a kindly physician like Marcus Welby, a scientist like Madame Currie, a sagacious professor, or an enlightened political leader like Nelson Mandela. They are symbols for the wise and good people everywhere who are faithfully and honestly seeking the truth and something truly sacred to believe in, which, according to the story, can be found as nowhere else in the nativity tableau: a baby born to loving, hopeful parents of modest circumstance. Orthodox Christians tend to get uppity and defensive about Jesus’ birth being unique. And, of course, it was unique. Just as everyone’s birth is unique. Most Unitarian Universalists look at the events described as happening that first Epiphany in the manner that Sophia Lyon Fahs does:  

     Each night a child is born is a holy night, 

          Fathers and mothers— 

          sitting beside their children’s cribs 

          feel glory in the sight of new life beginning…. 

     Each night a child is born is a holy night— 

No less of a reason to rejoice, at least to my way of thinking. Unitarian Universalists celebrate the potential all people share to grow in Spirit and insight: to come into their own individualized reflection of the Christ Consciousness available to all people when they look within. Into the soul, the psyche, the Atman that is Brahman in every woman and every man’s heart of hearts.  

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 So far, we’ve been talking exclusively about Epiphany with a capital ‘E.’ There is another kind of epiphany, spelled with a lower case ‘e.’ It is to these “lower case epiphanies” that I now want to direct our attention. The dictionary defines a “small ‘e’” epiphany as “An appearance or manifestation, especially of a deity.” I was talking with a colleague, the Reverend Alyson Jacks, comparing thoughts on this subject: Alyson said she thought of epiphanies as “ah-ha” experiences, where suddenly you just “get” something that you had not before: a sudden insight, discovery, or flash of recognition. Epiphanies of this ilk can be delightful and charming, but not always. The discovery of a tell-tale love letter or missing funds may well lead to an ah-ha moment, but surely not a joyful one. The common denominator is seeing things in a new way—a more accurate way. “Oh, yes! Now I see! The carbon molecule takes the form a ring!” realized the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé. Ah-ha! An epiphany. 

James Carse is a professor at New York University who has authored several fascinating books on matters such as these. In one of them, Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience, Professor Carse describes an epiphany he had as a teenager sailing an old schooner with a bunch of other young men on Lake Michigan. One night the skipper put Carse on a night watch; while others slept, he had responsibility for maintaining their course into daylight. He did that by locking onto a star and staying with it, reveling in the pristine moonless night air and sky. When the captain came on deck at sunrise, he suddenly went ballistic. The ship was thirty degrees off course! Only then did young Carse realize that the stars he had charted his course by had, through the course of the night, been moving steadily westward across the summer sky. Or rather “…what I saw was this: instead of a boat sailing across Lake Michigan, chasing the stars in their westward drift, it was the lake, the earth itself, turning away from the stars. The earth was rolling in her own sea but under us, not with us. As for the ship, she held unerringly to her course through the galaxies. (Roughly the same image presented in one of our favorite Unitarian hymns, Blue Boat Home in the teal hymnal.) 

Ah-ha! And it’s a sublime image, surely, but neither charming nor delightful; deeply embarrassing to the author, actually, but profound in the sense that he never saw himself quite the same again, and never experienced the world in quite so pre-Copernican a way. He had an epiphany, in that ever afterwards he saw things in a more accurate way and as part of a larger scheme.  

As “an appearance or manifestation, especially of a deity” epiphanies clearly have a spiritual aspect. The author James Joyce thought so. Writing in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce declares “By an epiphany [I] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether… of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself.” Joyce’s writing discipline involved recovering these epiphanies with extreme care, writing them down exactly, and putting them unadorned into his work.  

Another author who writes about epiphanies, one more accessible for me than James Joyce, is Annie Dillard. Strongly influenced by the Transcendentalist Unitarians Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975. In it she describes her experience wandering the countryside behind her house in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. She looks at the seasons coming and going—burgeoning spring followed by prodigal summer, fruitful autumn and then the long still months of wintertime. The flora, the fauna, the wind and rain, the curve of the earth, shadows at different hours of the day; animal nests, mating calls—all masterfully described and beautifully interlaced with observations about how people see. That is: see deeply, into the essence of things. And the many ways we train ourselves not to see—such that many people hardly see anything at all. 

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek includes a long sequence in which Annie Dillard describes an amazing book she read by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. When Western surgeons discovered how to perform safe cataract operations, they ranged across Europe and America operating on dozens of people of all ages who had been blinded by cataracts since birth. Von Senden collected accounts of many such cases. Learning to see at an advanced age is not as easy as one might think. Some people, however, do manage to learn, especially the young people. “When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, [one] girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the tree with lights in it’” writes Dillard. “It was for this tree,” the author goes on, that…  

I searched through peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall, and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking nothing at all and I saw the tree with lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly afire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since (Annie Dillard concludes) only very rarely seen the tree with lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it…. 

Some epiphanies are transpersonal. Whole communities change their ways of thinking, seeing anew their situation and abandoning outmoded, old-fashioned ways for new attitudes and understandings. I have been struck by the irony of the January 6th Capitol Insurrection happening on the very day long celebrated as one of sudden new awareness and insight, for seeing the truth about a situation not fully recognized until that point. As our President asked in a speech three days ago “Has America become a land where citizens accept political violence as a norm? Where we allow partisan election officials to overturn the legal expressed will of the people?” And where one political party has become the timid captive of a narcissistic pathological liar who was soundly defeated at the polls but won’t admit it to himself or to the country. And for whom Fox News and much of the major media are errand boys, helping plan and trying to execute a coup d’état. Hearing last Thursday from the President and from Republican Representative Liz Cheney outlining the events of a year ago, I now see the 2020 GOP Presidential campaign and Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the will of millions of American voters as part of a larger—and very nefarious—scheme. Talk about an epiphany! 

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 So? What are we to make of all this? What can we take away and learn from it? It’s my hope that we can make a pledge, each of us, internally, to cultivate epiphanies. Learning to see things in new, brighter, more integral ways: learning to re-cognize our connections to larger patterns than our egos. It think that’d be good; good for everyone.  

Radical breakthroughs happen. But one must bid them internally. You must resolve, internally, that you want to see things in new and brighter ways. That’s the beginning. 

The beautiful myth of Nativity and Christmas now is over. Another year celebrating the return of light and hope at winter solstice has come and gone.  

Let us recognize the hopeful and uplifting message in our Unitarian Universalist slant on Epiphany: that the incarnation indwells in everyone (“Each night a child is born is a holy night.”) And its corollary (in the words of the late reggae musician Bob Marley) “A mighty god is a living man.” 

Let us do our part to recognize the extraordinary potential of every human child when guided and encouraged lovingly. Let us also recognize the extraordinary capacity we share as awake and sentient beings to see. And to see the awesome and the breathtaking everywhere; not only in the minds and hearts of children, but in “trees with lights in them” everywhere we look… whenever we are blessed with a sense of epiphany. 

So may it be. Day after day throughout the year to come. And the many years beyond. 

Amen. Blessed Be. 

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