EPIPHANIES: personal and otherwise

1. In church tradition, the word “epiphany” refers to…

A) A pronounced disinterest or lack of enthusiasm

B) A crude reference to the physiology of certain of Jesus’ disciples

C) A brand of acoustic guitar

D) None of the above

2) I always heard that “epiphany” meant…

A) “The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles”

B) “A sudden realization or comprehension of the essence or meaning of something”

C) A disclosure of truth that could not have been predicted or controlled

D) All of the above

3) Epiphaneia= revelation; disclosure; manifestation; discovery; “aha”…etc.

The “Epiphany Season” in the church year= readings/prayers/music that are particularly “epiphanic” , i.e. reveal the mission and identity of God in Christ.

4) 1^st Sunday in Epiphany= Baptism of Christ. A paradigmatic event. The heavens “split open” (schizomai) and the spirit-world/real world dichotomy is shattered. Not a “public” event- seen only by Jesus? How could the Evangelist have known? When do the heavens split open for us?

5) “Thin Places”. In the Celtic spiritual tradition there are shrines, caves, springs of water, and groves of trees where people experienced a “thinning” of the “wall” between the sacred and the mundane. In 1931, Mahatma Gandhi wrote in A Spiritual Message to the World

“There is an indefinable, mysterious power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. It is this unseen power that makes itself felt and defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses. It transcends the senses.”

6) I knew “thin places” before I knew about God or the church, or about Celtic Spirituality. The spiritual path which I have followed, and which I can commend to others, is one that begins with this primal, “pre-religious” experience of The Sacred.

At Muir Woods in California…

we walked silently among the ancient trees …the day before, we had visited Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and walked the Labyrinth in silence…at Muir Woods, the silence walked tangibly with us, and the tourists lowered their voices in the same liturgical sort of way…the next day, among the tourist crowds at Fisherman’s Wharf, one of our group was moved to say, “sometimes it seems that everyplace is thin.”

“Thin places” do not appeal to everyone. Many people brush up against such experiences, and find them too unsettling. The most successful mega-churches devise their worship so as to seem familiar and not particularly “religious.” I believe that an experience that is not the least bit spooky or strange cannot be epiphanic.

“Easter occurs, again and again, in this opening-up of a void, the sense of absence which questions our egocentric aspirations and our longing for ‘tidy drama’; it occurs when we find in Jesus not a dead friend but a living stranger…(p.74) The risen Jesus is strange and yet deeply familiar, a question to what we have known, loved, and desired, and yet continuous with the friend we have known and loved. His strangeness and recognizability are both shocking, standing as they do in such inseparable connection.” (p. 84) Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, Rowan Williams, Pilgrim press, 2002)

7) “Parable” and “Myth” (John Dominic Crossan, cited in Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals by Herbert Anderson & Edward Foley)

A) Myth= stories/ideas that reinforce our idea of what is normal and real.

B) Parable= stories/ideas that call into question our idea of reality.

To be epiphanic, there must be some element of parable, but how can there be parables when all the myths have been discredited or forgotten? The task of the church is to re-inflate the myths sufficiently so as to make the parables distinguishable.

8) If the above makes little or no sense to you, don’t let it bother you. If you pay attention to your own experiences, and allow them to be called into question, you are doing just fine. If all experiences seem the same, and that is just fine with you, it’s no wonder you think what I am talking about is nonsense.

9) What is the difference between an “epiphany” and a “stupid idea?”

At

Meditation on a Drawing by Fritz Eichenberg

Born in a manger

Announced by angels

Tracked by comets

Greeted by shepherds

Welcomed by gentle animals

Sought by ruthless kings

Found by curious magi

Adored by generations:

Remember the children

Save the church

Calm the avenger

Heal the rivers

Restore the fish

Reconcile religions

Restrain demons

Depose idols

Deploy angels

Whatever it takes.

CHRISTMAS, 2011

May mirth and merriment prevail in your households and in your hearts.

Jonathan+, Nancy and

Jason, Jayden, & Teagan (Troy) Caitlin & Michael (New York City) James (Troy) David (Detroit) Zack (Flint, MI, soon to be Bedford, IN) Katie (East Lansing, MI)

Hunting and Hunted

Advent: Hunting and Hunted

Why is it that I seem to flourish during Advent?

“It’s because he gets to go deer hunting,” you are thinking, and that is partly true.

Yet there is more to Advent, even for someone who cherishes the rituals of deer camp only a

little less than those of the church year. As the weather grows more harsh, something in the heart

of the world seems to soften. As the leaves wither and dry, something in the trees comes alive, as

if listening. As the first snows soften the landscape, something warms the spirit, just as a

woodstove warms a frigid room.

“There he goes, back to deer camp again,” you may be thinking. But it was in Advent, 1958,

that I first attended a silent Retreat, and first allowed myself to become submerged in the flow of

divine reality around me. It snowed heavily during those three days, wrapping the Retreat

Center in a shroud of silence. For the first time, I found myself spending long periods of time

sitting quietly in church with no service in progress, no organized activity at all, only the tangible

sense of a silent and living presence.

If you think that was odd behavior for a sixteen-year old, remember that I was used to sitting

for hours in the woods listening for the sound of a deer’s approach. Listening for God isn’t that

much different, except that you don’t wear blaze orange and you don’t have the intention of

shooting God if given the opportunity.

But in Advent we are “hunting” for God, and, amazingly, God comes “hunting” for us. So the

hunter becomes the hunted, stalked by a ghostly presence. Yet this powerful being is the most

gentle of predators, the kindest of adversaries. To be swallowed by God is the happiest of fates.

To be ambushed by God is to cast out all fear. To be preyed upon by God is the epitome of

prayer. To die with God is to be reborn with Christ at Bethlehem, in Michigan, or in Paradise.

These may not be your Advent thoughts, nor were they mine in the winter of 1958. But every

Advent has its own surprises, its own brand of silence. All we have to do is listen.

Random Reflections: The "Great O Antiphons"

Random Reflections: The “Great O Antiphons”at Christ Church Cranbrook, 2^nd Sunday of Advent, 20-11

Latin phrases often evoke strange, and sometimes bizarre, associations for me. Last Sunday at Christ Church Cranbrook, as I listened to the choir chant the traditional Advent “O Antiphons”, these are some of the random thoughts that occurred to me, and I wrote down…

O sapientia. O wisdom. O intelligibility. O logic. O sanity. O mathematical equations. O sentence structure and syntax. O coherence and structure and form. If objects are indeed intelligible, “does not the intelligibility of the object presuppose an intelligent ground?” (Bernard Lonergen)“O O O O that Shakespearian Rag— It’s so elegant So intelligent…” (T.S. Eliot) O sapientia, “quae ex ore altissimi prodisti, and covered the earth like a mist.’ (Ecclesiasticus 24:2) O O O O.

O Adonai. O mighty. O fire of the Burning Bush. O consumption unconsumed. O point dimensionless, at which Being emerges, unexplained, from Nothing, at this moment coaxing atoms into material existence from the vortex of whatever whirls at their center, at this moment spinning us off from the limitless center, spinning us off as atomic dervishes, whirling mightily, whirling on the seamless line where Nothing ends…

O radix Jesse. O root. O radish. O turnip. O beet. O rutabaga, O root vegetables of every kind, buried safely under earth and snow, beyond the need for retaliation or revenge, beyond the need to hurt or destroy in all the holy mountain, feeding us far into the winter, feeding us when all other food has failed, feeding us jam noli tardare – never tardy, rarely served in fashionable restaurants, barely noticed by government inspectors, ever abundant, ever prodigal, ever rooted/radix/radical/ and real…

O clavis David. O key. O combination to the lock. O password. “You open and no one closes; you close, and no one opens”. Sedentum in tenebris et umbra mortis… sedimented in darkness and under the umbrella of death… buried under yards of earth alongside the beets and radishes… buried, but here unearthed by the descent of a mighty silence, its power unlocked by chant, loud organ, and this clavis David…

O oriens- O rising dawn. O morning star. Directional orientation for every nomadic tribe, gravitational force without magnetism, center without circumference, beloved of navigators, goal of every compass, hope of the lost …(disoriented in thick woods, I came across my own boot-prints in the snow, consulted my compass, saw how lost I had become, saw, astounded, how much counterintuitivity would be required to become unlost again. From whence did all these benign themes originate? Hope for the lost…release of prisoners… kindness to strangers… peace among peoples… food for the hungry…water in drought-stricken places… a universal vision of gentleness and mutual peace… how did such notions come to swirl together with such force within the literature of one small middle-eastern country?... How do such far-fetched notions come to resonate so powerfully with us still?

O Rex gentium… O ruler of the unruly and the alien, the unbelievers and the unsaved…O rock and cornerstone…lapisque angularis…

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.

W.B. Yeats, Lapis Lazuli

We are the long-legged bird, lifted by the music for a bird’s eye view, lifted high above the angle of the rock, our lapisque angularis, which is our listening-post, our perch, our launch pad, and, if we ever hope to come to earth again, our landing-zone.

O Emmanuel… O God-who-is with, with us, with it …with our children in an unknown future, with these singers in a flourishing past, with us witless pilgrims come from outer space, washed up unexpected on what Holy Isle?