On Sunday we celebrate the feast of the Epiphany, when three wise
men affirmed the kingship of Jesus by bringing him gifts of gold, frankincense,
and myrrh. The writer James Joyce used the word epiphany to mean the
"revelation of the whatness of a thing." Certainly, the three wise
men revealed one aspect of the “whatness” of Jesus—his kingship—though it was
not an earthly but a heavenly kingship beyond their imagination.
Joyce also used the word epiphany to describe the moment when
“the soul of the commonest object […] seems to us radiant. Consequently, for
those of us who have experienced the epiphany that God’s spirit infuses all of
creation and that we are all part of the body of Christ, everything we
encounter should be radiant. Why is this not so? The writer Terry Pratchett
offers a possible explanation: “It’s a popular fact that 90 percent of the
brain is not used, and, like most popular facts, it is wrong…. It is used. One
of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual
into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of
everything, would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying, ‘Wow,’ a lot. Part
of the brain exists to stop this from happening.”
As Emily Dickinson said, "The truth dazzles gradually, or else the world would be blind." The feast of Epiphany is an annual reminder to open ourselves a bit more to the "whatness" of Christ and allow this truth to radiate in our very extraordinary day-to-day lives.
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