Epiphany 2024

Epiphany is my favorite holiday. Most holidays are separate from daily life, set apart, and are about celebrating. Epiphany, it seems to me, teaches us how to live.

Here is my version of the myth — the story — of Epiphany. People, like our three wise men, get comfortable. Today we would say they have homes and families, pastimes and jobs. They have worked hard for stability, or inherited it, or been lucky. In any case, even wise and thoughtful, spiritual and well-intentioned people get complacent, lost in their assumptions, stuck in their ways.

These particular Wise Men were readers. They “read” what was available — the earth and the sky. So they studied the stars and learned the lessons the stars had to teach. That was how they figured out a very special baby was to be born. People laughed at the wise men and their interpretation of the message of the heavens. They set out on their journey anyhow. It was a long arduous journey full of danger and intrigue.

They found the baby, (Matthew Chapter 2) and they understood what they had discovered: nothing from their old lives fit anymore. After the lessons of the journey and the meeting of Mary and her baby, all the old “stuff” of their lives, their ways, their rules, their standards, their choices didn’t jive. Their privilege and wealth and prestige felt hollow and unsatisfying. They had to change, and most of their world was not changing with them. If they followed their truth, they would be the oddballs, the outliers, the weirdos.

My parents once bought a new chair for the living room. When they brought it home and put it in the room with all the old furniture, it looked like a monstrosity, totally out of kilter with everything else. They ended up buying a new room full of furniture. And so it is with us when we grasp something big and true and encompassingly revolutionary. We must “clean house” and get rid of the old, outdated ideas. Many of us take the occasion of the new year to clean out our files and our closets. It’s Epiphany which encourages us to straighten up and straighten out our minds and hearts.

Epiphany teaches us that the path to the truth might be as uncomfortable as riding a camel through the desert. The truth we come to know as our truth might not be the truth most of our friends and family embrace. And, when we get some justification or validation for our way of thinking or feeling, we might get mighty uncomfortable with some of our former decisions and choices.

And that’s why I love Epiphany. Today we revere courage, resilience, integrity, and hope. We remember that every fall the leaves die so they can bud and burst through in the spring. I believe we are asked to never stop growing, learning, changing, and “just keep swimming, Nemo.”

Love, Susan

T.S.Eliot’s poem Journey of the Magi is well worth a read. (I couldn’t figure out how to get it copied here.)