The Christmas season ends January 5, and Epiphany begins January 6.
Malcolm Guite describes an epiphany:
"An epiphany is a showing, given only for a distinct moment, yet of something eternal. The question always arises, how do we deal with such epiphanies?...We no sooner have these moments of epiphany than they seem to be taken from us. The question is how we can live from them, draw from them, return to them." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 150)
The celebration of Epiphany in the church centers on events of Jesus' life that acted as 'showings', moments that revealed, through dense scriptural allusion, who Jesus really is. Three particular events that have become significant for this season over the centuries are the Magi visiting the child Jesus, Jesus' baptism, and the Wedding at Cana when Jesus turned water into wine.
But back to Guite's question: how do we deal with epiphanies when as soon as we have them they are taken from us? We have 'mountain-top' moments. God becomes clear, and we do too - as clear as the landscapes and vistas that spread out before us. But soon enough, we are down from the mountain again, trying to recall the splendor, but it just isn't the same. How do we catch epiphanies?
Guite relates the story of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. An opium addict, married, yet nurturing a passionate, adulterous attraction to another woman, unable to tolerate the daily drudgeries of home life, yet struggling to sustain an income through his work and thus leaving his family nearly impoverished for much of their life - Coleridge had good reason to be spiritually pent-up and dissatisfied. And it was in this state that while climbing a mountain, he found himself physically pent-up as well, stuck partway down a cliff, unable to rise nor descend. In his terror, he experienced there an epiphany of the gift of life:
"My Limbs were all in a tremble - I lay upon my Back to rest myself, & was beginning according to my Custom to laugh at myself for a Madman, when the sight of the Crags above me on each side, & the impetuous Clouds just over them, posting so luridly & so rapidly northward, overawed me. I lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance & Delight - & blessed God aloud, for the powers of Reason & the Will, which remaining no Danger can overpower us! O God, I exclaimed aloud - how calm, how blessed am I now... (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, quoted in Guite, Waiting on the Word, 144)
Coleridge would write a poem about this thrilling experience of spiritual transcendence which took place on Scafell Pike in Great Britain. But you wouldn't know it from his poem. Considering Scafell Pike to be too 'humble', he had encountered a description of the Vale of Chamouny in the Swiss Alps. Finding it to be a better match, he reframed his poem to take place there instead. A better external representation for his internal mountain top experience!
Malcolm Guite thinks this sheds light on a common human tendency: we are embarrassed by the distinct and sometimes embarrasing settings in which we experience transcendence and joy:
"In some ways it's a pity that Coleridge felt so ashamed of his own fraught circumstances, so unworthy of the religious epiphany he had experienced, that he felt the need to transfer it to some safe distance, for to my mind there is gospel in knowing that God gives us these experiences just where we are, on our own 'humble mountains', in the midst of our complicated, shadowed and ambiguous lives."
Sinners don't deserve epiphanies! When they encounter them, its tempting to 'reframe' them to emphasize something heroic. As though the epiphany didn't happen to lowly Coleridge on lowly Scafell Pike, but rather Coleridge went out and heroically found the epiphany while scaling the heights of the magnificent Vale of Chamouny! As though God doesn't really have to come down to us, but we can go up to him.
We come back to the initial question: how do we deal with epiphanies when as soon as we have them they are taken from us? Coleridge shows us how we try to keep control, how we try to catch epiphanies and keep them. Like Coleridge, we fudge the truth and make ourselves and our situation look better than they are. As though God didn't have to come that far down to reach Coleridge. Or me. But this also distances us from the God we see in Jesus. He didn't only love us when we were good. He loved us in our wretchedness. He gave his life for sinners. We were as low as could be. And that's where Christ comes to meet us and save us.
Coleridge's life seemed to have been touched with tragedy all through. No great reconciliations, no great triumphs marked its end. So we'll end with his poetry from the event we've described here:
That as I raise my head, awhile bowed low
In adoration, upward from thy base
Slow travelling with dim eyes suffused with tears,
Solemnly seemest, like a vapoury cloud,
To rise before me - Rise, O ever rise
Rise like a cloud of incense from the Earth!
Thou kingly Spirit throned among the hills,
Thou dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven,
Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God
(Coleridge, "Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni", quoted in Guite, 145)
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