The Whatness of God

The solemnity of Epiphany is a beautiful feast with many throught-provoking symbols. Today in the Writer’s Almanac, it was noted that the writer James Joyce “…gave us a secular meaning of ‘epiphany,’ using the word to mean the ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing,’ the moment when ‘the soul of the commonest object [...] seems to us radiant.’ This meaning, however, is not only secular but sacred.

The birth of Jesus was a revelation of the “whatness” of God. What is God? Along other things, God is one who, out of love, takes on our human form to experience what we experience—birth, nurturing, persecution, maturation, vocation, work, relationship, pain,  consolation, suffering, death, and resurrection. In doing so, God expresses a desire for intimacy with us and “crowns us with love and compassion” (Ps 103:4).

When our eyes are opened to the “whatness” of God, we understand that God’s essence is in all things, that we are all connected through the body of Christ, and everyone and everything seems radiant. As Thomas Merton described in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness. . . . This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

“Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . .”

In the revelation of the “whatness” of God, we see reflected the “whatness” of ourselves and each other, which is cause for great joy. May the radiance of Epiphany remain with us and help us see ourselves and others as we really are—one in the love of God.