Epiphany 2009
Not much attention is paid to Epiphany in the UK, especially now that it simply falls on the second Sunday after Christmas rather than having its own special day on the sixth of January. It is simply Twelfth Night, the day when you are supposed to take down the Christmas decorations, on pain of appalling bad luck in the year to come. In Spain, it is the day when presents are given, the equivalent of Christmas Day in the UK; in Italy it is celebrated as Befana (though what witches have to do with Epiphany I do not know) and in France they eat, with much ritual, the Gateau des Rois – very much nicer than Christmas Pudding – and the person who gets the bean in their portion becomes King or Queen for the day. But I’m not sure that they are more concerned than we are about the significance of the feast, which is a pity. Epiphany is perhaps the richest of all the feasts of the Church’s year. I don’t say it’s the most important; it clearly isn’t that; but first, it is the only feast that celebrates more than one event: the coming of the Magi, the Baptism of Christ, and the Marriage at Cana; and, second, it is suggestive as no other feast is, overflowing with so many and so varied themes. It has been called the Feast of Light, and seen as a celebration of the stars and of the angels which belong to them. It is the justification of lavishness and riches in the service of God; it is the distant prophecy of the entry of the Gentiles into the Church; it tells of Christ’s triple nature as God, mortal, and universal priest-mediator; it contains both the Blessed Trinity and the Holy Family, it is a celebration of life and joy in the Marriage at Cana – and it is an indisputable expression both of Mary’s care for us and of her power with her divine son.
But you couldn’t exhaust Epiphany with a list, however long. And the wonderful thing about the feasts of the Church, a characteristic they share with the Bible, is that they say different things to you each year. I am no mystic, despite my monastic past. I am never rapt in ecstasy, and I do not have an intense or palpable sense of the presence of God – not most of the time, at any rate. My prayer is mostly just like yours is mostly: as disturbed and dissipated, as seemingly useless, as boring and unsatisfying for the one praying. But one thing I have been given – as can be guessed from the fact that the last verse of the hymn “Adoro te” most fully sums up my spirituality – is a longing, at times an almost unbearable longing, for God. Not even for the “heavenly homeland”; not a nostalgia for a golden age; for God. I suspect that the dismal failure of so many of my hour-long prayer-times is due to the fact that one can’t just sit and long for an hour at a time without becoming both distracted and self-conscious. For what, precisely, do I long? That I can’t tell you. I know that when in the psalms I come across verses such as “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water”, I am saying something profoundly true, not in the abstract, not with an undertone of “wouldn’t it be nice”, but very specifically true for me.
But I can’t tell you what are the characteristics of this Person for whom I long. I have never met him closely enough to know that; I can only tell you what he is not. I lose interest pretty quickly when people list the lovable or adorable characteristics of God. I suppose they are right, though at times I feel like crying (in an echo of my History supervisor at Cambridge) “Evidence! Evidence!”. Those characteristics are just not interesting. They are not gripping. They do not hold my attention. They feel abstract and irrelevant. I know that Jesus is the Good Shepherd. I know that God is Love. I know that Jesus is the Wisdom of God and the Power of God. And I know that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And these are things which he has said about himself and which are, therefore, true: no lack of evidence there: Truth himself speaks truly, or there’s nothing true. I have been known to wrestle with these during prayer time, trying to squeeze some spiritual or even emotional response from myself. It cannot be done, except insofar as I succeed in not thinking about the concepts but connect with the One about whom all these words are used. Because spiritual response does not take place in the brain but bypasses it; and the only way words will ever elicit it is if they are allowed to go straight to the soul, where a response undoubtedly takes place, but not one that can be explained, rationalised, or, sometimes, even perceived sufficiently for it to be comprehensible, recognisable, or make any sense at all. The other things, the non-biblical things that people say because they like or approve of a certain characteristic or feel the need of it in their own lives (under this heading come not only personal devotions, some most odd, but also all the groups who have hi-jacked Jesus and him into one of them), all these I can only ignore. They do not speak to me, the more so because, as doctrines and teachings of human beings, they risk misrepresenting the One for whom I long.
I can feel you getting restive. This insight into the spiritual life of the blogger is gripping, I hear you say, but what has it got to do with Epiphany? As Paul would say, much in every way. Let me return to what I said earlier: the feasts say something different every year, and something different to every person. This year, and to me, Epiphany is the feast of longing, the feast of those who consider no effort too much in their search for their heart’s desire. To me there can be no more potent symbol of longing than those Magi, whoever they were, from heaven-knows-where, following a star on the slimmest of evidence to heaven-knows-where, in search of a shadowy king of a mysterious tiny nation whose significance on the world stage was almost nil. Why? They could not have told you why, they could not have told you what they hoped he would do for them, what would happen if they did find him. All they knew was that they were drawn so forcible that they could not resist; and the pull was not on their bodies but on their hearts and souls. They did not know what it was for which they longed. But they longed, unbearably; nothing could compete.
Today or maybe not today
Tonight or not tonight,
All voices that command or pray
Calling me,
Shall kindle in my soul such fire
And in my eyes such light
That I shall see that heart’s desire
I long to see.
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