Solemnity of the Epiphany – 8 January 2023
On New Year’s Eve last year, I was introduced to ChatGPT – the powerful, interactive search engine that is built with Artificial Intelligence. Its capacity is overwhelming, creating instant responses to questions that are as personal as they are detailed. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence to become an active partner in conversation brings us to a new threshold of the Communications Revolution. It suggests a new frontier of cyberspace. Clearly, the future belongs now to the engagement with Artificial Intelligence on a whole range of levels. It’s a brave new world. The remarkable thing, of course, about ChatGPT is just not its power to galvanise the scope of the internet, but how instant everything is. In a few moments, tis does all the searching and presents the outcomes in such a comprehensive and cohesive way.
But what might this mean for our expectations about life itself? Because life, true life, is not instant, and our capacity to search is undeniably significant. The most important things in our life are those for which we must search and for which we must wait truly.
Of course, the most important experiences which involve waiting are beyond simply a matter of time. We wait to see how the current economic crisis is going to play out; we wait for someone we love to re-connect; we wait for our partner to acknowledge an aspect of our relationship that needs to move; we wait for our children – or for our parents – to understand; we wait beside someone we love in their illness and especially in their final days with us. Still more, there is a waiting about the nature of life itself: we wait to perceive what the right direction in our life might be; we wait to understand the meaning of our experiences especially the hurts that linger in our memory; we wait to grasp what the mystery of our faith and of God’s communication to us might be really about. A very definition of prayer, itself, is that it is, in its depth, an exercise of profound waiting – hearing a question rise from deep within us that waits with longing and desire for its answer. For this reason, waiting is an intrinsic experience in the spiritual life, in our unfolding appreciation of the presence of God in our life, and in how God might be inviting us to a deeper and fuller life. This is true for us as it was true for all the great figures in the Christian story. Nothing is instant in either our discovery or understanding of God – or of others, or of ourselves for that matter. We forget about how St. Paul, upon his dramatic conversion on the way to Damascus, then went off and spent 17 years in the Arabian Desert before he began his pilgrimages to the early Christian communities and before he began his correspondence with them. Seventeen years of waiting to understand what he had experienced on the road to bring him to sufficient confidence to begin his ministry.
The question is how we use the experience of waiting. Do we fight it? Do we simply tolerate it with resentment? Or do we enter it, engage it, and allow it to have its effect upon us? For the power of waiting is to provide us, even despite ourselves often enough, the space, the window, to reflect on what might be really going on for us and in us. The potential in our waiting, of our waiting, is a deeper clarification about ourselves, about our relationships, about our life, about what is important for us or otherwise. For this reason, the spiritual writer, Simone Weil once wrote, “we obtain the most precious things in our life not by searching for them, but by waiting for them.” It is the quality of our waiting, rather than the frenzy of our grabbing, that brings home to us the most important gifts that we enjoy.
The journey of the wise men from the East to the stable at Bethlehem essentially is one of waiting as they search. The people who come out of the shadows of a distant horizon only have a question, “Where is the Infant King of the Jews?” It is indeed the question that they ask on behalf of us all. We, too, search for the One who comes into our midst with the promise to deliver us from all that binds us, from all that stunts us, from all that holds us back to being the people God has created us to be. “Where is he?” we ask. “Where might we find him?” Our hearts are on a search for something, someone.
Indeed, the star that rises in the east quickens our perspective. In other words, the indication that something new has come into our world invites us to change our stance. It moves us from the perspective in which we had been previously bound. Often that position is defined not by the question, “Where?” but by the question, “Why?” We can become fixated with the question of “Why?” Why must I have to suffer in this way? Why must this event or experience be part of my life? Why must the ones I love so much have to endure a hardship? Why does there have to be such conflict in our world? Why do good people have to suffer? Why do we need to experience the pain of absence, of distance, of loss? Yet, to the extent that we are bound by the question of “Why?” we get nowhere. For most often there is no answer to the question, “Why?” And then the question turns against us. It condemns us to rail against life, and we can become locked in our resentment, our anger, or our cynicism.
The wise men that come to Bethlehem are not consumed by the question, “Why?” They are led, rather, by the question, “Where?” The star that they follow transforms the question of ‘why?’ into the question of ‘where?’ And the question, “Where?’ begins to make a difference. Those who ask the question, “Where?” do not stay where they are, but they open their hearts and their lives to a new discovery. When we can let go of the question of why, and ask instead, “Where is God in what is happening to me?” then our whole stance in life changes. “Where is God in my illness? Where is God in my failure? Where is God in what my children are going through? Where is God in what I am struggling with at the moment?” There is an entirely different dynamism present now than when we were locked simply in asking, “Why?”
The change from “why” to “where” makes all the difference. It’s a change of only three letters but the change is as great as the very distance the wise men themselves travelled. The answer to the question, “Where?” does not come quickly or easily, just as it did not for the wise men from the East in search of the Child Jesus. But now, as for them, we begin to move into an open horizon. And like the wise men we may be surprised by what we discover.
And suddenly a light shines in the midst of what we experience, a light that transforms our experience. Behold, not just the instant response of artificial intelligence, but the epiphany of the Lord.
