Epiphany of the Lord – 2 January 2022
We are but a day into the new year, a new year which has started with the most extraordinary sense of our vulnerability – our vulnerability before the power of a contagious virus, our control of which still eludes us after two long years. This Sunday we gather conscious of those we know who have been recently infected, who are in isolation, and who cannot be with us.
A new year ordinarily starts with optimism and possibility. This year has started with enormous concern. Indeed, in the face of the historic moment by which we are gripped there is little room for appeals to optimism. They present as facile and hollow. Optimism is not a solution; it’s an evasion of reality. Optimism does not help to give assurance, stability, and certainty.
Our Christian Tradition itself does not make us optimists. It makes us realists. It is the very framework by which we enter reality difficult as it is. As the Australian Jesuit, Peter Steele use to say, Christian spirituality means letting it come home truly and deeply how things are and responding from that situation. Should we accept this then we acknowledge that, like the wise men of old whom we commemorate this day, we are on a journey, a difficult journey. With them, we are presented with a question which will not admit of an easy resolution. It sets us on trajectory with a destination we do not know but which is the outcome of studied negotiation along the way. In Robert Dessaix’s words it makes us ‘travelers’ not ‘tourists.’[1] As he writes, the tourist is the one who must follow a prescribed course adding up to something. But a traveller is someone else. A traveller is someone who allows what happens to them tell a story, to take them to the unexpected place but one which nonetheless opens a new possibility which was never envisaged – in fact to what is truly an epiphany.
The story of the wise men’s own Epiphany presents as a paradigm of our own time in history. Those men of old are not seduced by optimism or slogans; they are not tourists. They are committed to the search for an answer to their question, a journey which takes them to the most unexpected of places. The story of the men of old is one of Epiphany, one of enlightenment. We can think of enlightenment as the outcome of the journey, at its end. However, enlightenment comes to us not only as a single moment of epiphany. It is also something that presents with dawning. And if we consider ourselves on a new journey, we are formed by what we see even now. In this current crisis, the end of which will elude us for a long time yet, many, in fact, are the epiphanies we are given already: especially the extraordinary commitment of our front-line health workers. All of them reveal to us what is good, beautiful, true. Today, we give thanks for the epiphany they are of the God who is present to us, through them, in what we are experiencing.
They show to us the gifts that we ourselves must bear at this time. What might these be? Might I share this poem by Maureen Killoran:
Not gold, nor myrrh, nor even frankincense
would I have for you this season,
but simple gifts, the ones that are hardest to find,
the ones that are perfect,
even for those who have everything (if such there be).
I would (if I could)
have for you the gift of courage,
the strength to face the gauntlets
only you can name,
and the firmness in your heart to know
that you (yes, you!) can be a bearer of the quiet dignity
that is the human glorified.
I would (if by my intention I could make it happen)
have for you the gift of connection,
the sense of standing on the hinge of time,
touching past and future
standing with certainty that you (yes, you!)
are the point where it all comes together.
I would (if wishing could make it so)
have for you the gift of community,
a nucleus of love and challenge,
to convince you in your soul
that you (yes, you!) are a source of light
in a world too long believing in the dark.
Not gold, nor myrrh, nor even frankincense,
would I have for you this season,
but simple gifts, the ones that are hardest to find,
the ones that are perfect,
even for those who have everything (if such there be).[2]
We do not know where this current drama will take us. But let its journey open our eyes so that we might see in a new way. Let it be such to bring forth new gifts to those around us. May they be our epiphany.
[1] See Robert Dessaix, “(and so forth)”, (Sydney: Macmillan Publishers, 1998), 140, 148.
[2] See https://www.xavier.edu/jesuitresource/online-resources/prayer-index/advent-and-christmas-prayers
