it's you

Epiphany.

It’s one of our stained-glass words that catches lots of light. Perhaps because it’s not one we use that much, or at least it doesn’t always have to do with church when we use it. The dictionary gives us a few options:

1. a Christian festival, observed on January 6, commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the gentiles in the persons of the Magi; Twelfth-day.
2. an appearance or manifestation, esp. of a deity.

The Magi are some of the characters in the story that catch my imagination in particular for a couple of reasons. One, they don’t make it on opening night. Two, nobody knows they’re coming, or that they were even invited. And, three, somehow they know exactly on Whom the star they’ve been following is shining. We say there were three because there were three gifts, but we don’t know much about them at all other than they were from out of town, rather extravagant shoppers, a little uninformed on the local political scene, and didn’t really fit in the Nativity scene for several reasons.

And somehow they knew when they found Jesus that they could stop looking.

As the church turned story into ritual, their coming on the twelfth day of Christmas symbolized God’s manifestation to the Gentiles: here’s the Messiah you didn’t even know you were looking for, other than that existential longing you carry around inside. There’s a third definition in the dictionary that seems to fit them better than the liturgical one:

3. a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

Who knows how long they walked – weeks, months. Yet, for some reason, they stopped at Mary and Joseph’s house, came up to the baby, who could have been close to toddling by then, and had the eyes of their hearts open enough to look at him and say, “It’s you!.”

The night I gave Ginger her engagement ring, I had a mix tape my friend Billy and I had meticulously planned for the evening, which was quite a production timed right down to Stephen Bishop singing, “It Might Be You” when I put the ring on her finger. Finding Ginger was a pivotal epiphany in my life, though there was nothing simple, homely, or commonplace about it. What it felt like that night was a feeling I never imagined I would get to feel. I didn’t know how to imagine it. It was beyond me, which is where I find the parallel to the peripatetic princes who finally stumbled into their own ecstasy.

If the parallel is indulgent, forgive me. Still, it seems to me good news that we think of epiphanies in the plural, particularly in a spiritual sense: we belong to a God who delights in surprise and paradox. We do well to keep asking one of the questions Stephen Bishop asks in his song:

if I found the place
would I recognize the face?

The history of all creation distills in the Incarnation and the Word becomes flesh in the person of a peasant boy born into a working-poor family in a region of no real consequence internationally, and he grows up and roams around the country side without much of an apparent plan other than to love and heal people and tell stories. The God who could imagine and breathe into being everything from helium isotopes to hippopotami, supernovas to centipedes, constellations to Cherokee purple heirloom tomatoes became human without fanfare or, for that matter, much efficiency. Though God would never have passed my church growth class in seminary, it was not a mistake. God inhabits the simple, the homely, or the commonplace waiting for those who know how to recognize the face, who can look and say, “It’s you.”

Peace,
Milton

P. S. – I can’t pass up the song, man. She still catches me by surprise.

catch me, please

At several different junctures in my life, Parker J. Palmer has befriended me and mentored me through his writings (in particular, The Courage to Teach and Let Your Life Speak). I have never met him, nor have I ever heard him speak, yet I have found a healing resonance in his written words that have helped me in my vocation, my depression, and my faith. On Sunday, therefore, when I passed the table in the hall at church where there is always a stack of Christian Centuries and saw he had written the cover story, “Taking Pen in Hand,” I picked it up and brought it home.

I will take it back, I promise.

I was pulled, in particular, by two paragraphs, which means here come a couple of long quotes.

All of our propositions and practices are earthen vessels. All of them are made by human beings of common clay to hold whatever we think we’ve found in our soul-deep quest for the sacred or in its quest for us. If our containers prove too crimped and cramped to hold our treasure well, if they domesticate the sacred and keep us from having a live encounter with it – or if they prove to be so twisted and deformed that they defile rather than honor the treasure they were intended to hold – then our containers must be smashed and discarded so we can create a larger and more life-giving vessel in which to hold the treasure.

Doing that is called iconoclasm. It is a good thing to do when it needs to be done. Failing to do that is called idolatry, which is always a bad thing. So even in the church, we need to commit conceptual suicide again and again – if we are serious about the vastness of the treasure in comparison to our flawed and finite words.

Though I might suggest we would do well to read that passage at any or all of our churches’ annual meetings, the real power of the words hits me on a more personal level. Yes, one of my favorite quotes from the Chronicles of Narnia is that Aslan is not a tame lion. Yes, I have preached more than one sermon and had more than one conversation about the wild, untamed God to whom we belong. Still, I read the article and thought to myself, “It’s been a long time since I let God catch me by surprise.”

This blog is a couple of months away from being five years old. I feel good about my writing here and wish I had managed to turn a couple of my ideas into books. I’m back to teaching for a living and cooking for family and friends in a way that I feel I was built to do. My marriage is my favorite thing about my life. I keep playing my guitar and wishing someone would stop me on the street and ask me to be in their band. I have felt free of my depression for a year and a half and I am grateful. I am learning new things about what it means to be family in these days. Life is good.

And I wonder.

I wonder about the man I have talked to a couple of times at the grocery store who works with refugees from Nepal who are trying to make a new life here. I am showing the kids at school a movie about the continuing, though invisible, crisis in Darfur, Sudan, which I have kept up with for years and written about occasionally. I still think about opening a café like One World Everybody Eats where people pay what they can – or maybe a food truck, just because I like food trucks.

I’m not restless or unhappy, and I wonder – because people like Palmer speak to my heart:

“Why write,” said Jose Oretega y Gasset, “if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bullfighting risk and we do not approach dangerous agile and two-horned topics?”

And why believe in God if the God we believe in is so small as to be contained and controlled within our finite words and forms? The aim of our writing about faith, and of our living in faith, is to let God be God: original, wild and free, a creative impulse that drives our living and our writing but can never be contained within the limits of who we are and what we think and say and do.

However the circumstances play out, I want to be caught by surprise. I love the imagery in that phrase: caught – like a child is caught when he or she falls, or a person is caught by a camera in that serendipitous moment where the image reveals a lifetime of feeling – by surprise – as though God was waiting to turn on the lights and yell when I come into the dark house at night.

I’m praying for the grace to open every door with a sense of anticipation. After all, Aslan is not a tame lion.

Peace,
Milton