The Epiphany of the Lord

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I worry sometimes that I'm a bit too nostalgic. I tend to refer to things by their old names. For example, to me it's not the 2 or 3 train: it's the "IRT." Some people find this tendency in me charming. Others find it annoyingly eccentric.

Another example: in the old days, the feast we celebrate today, the Epiphany, used to initiate a whole season of the Church's calendar that helped us mark time until the beginning of Lent. Appropriately, it was called "Epiphantide," or the Epiphany Season. I'm sad that it's officially gone. But as an act of nostalgic resistance, I celebrate it on my own.

Here's why: on the Epiphany we hear how the proclamation of the message of Christmas which begins as something close and protected among a small group of people (people like St Joseph, the Blessed Mother, a few shepherds) is then offered and expanded out to the nations, the whole world. That's who the wisemen represent -- the whole world, including us. This is a feast of revelation, of God's mystery being shown, exposed, shared. It's a feast of warmth and illumination and, as such, It's quite extraordinary.

I realize that I can't take all of this in on just one day. I need at least a few weeks to appreciate and ponder it. And that's why I, at least, continue to observe the whole Epiphany Season. The point is that more time I take to try to do these things -- to look for the star, to appreciate the gifts of the Magi, to honor the need to go on journey and pilgrimage to find something new, to feel real fear that Herod is so threatened by a loving, merciful King that he wants to harm the newborn Prince of Peace -- the more likely I'm going to want to follow the example of the wisemen myself and to find Christ in the most surprising of ways.

This is a yearly opportunity to appreciate how the Holy Child born on Christmas demonstrates that God desires to be enfleshed in the most small and obscure of human lives (and by extension the most small and obscure parts of our lives) so that he can share in and love those places. What is poor is really rich; what is small is really large. God, who gifts us with life in the first place, see us as the most precious gift to him. It's as if each one of us, in God's eyes, comprised our own wonderful universe, an immensity of universe in such little space. Perhaps, as St. Teresa of Avila heard God say to her once, it's really true that God loves us so much that he also says this to each person: Nisi coelum creassem ob te solum crearem. "If I had not already created heaven, I would have created it just for you."

This Epiphany may all of us know more and more and in ever-increasing ways the beauty and wonder of our universe, and our heaven -- the worthiness our gifts and the God who delights in us and has given us to each other to delight in, too.

Joel Warden, Ph.D.

Catholic Scholar in Residence

St. Francis College