A Vision of God

Today is many things.

For one thing it’s the anniversary of Mr Trump’s little attempted putsch. Lots about that going on. And attention does need to be paid.

But in the Western Christian tradition today, the 6th of January is the feast of the Epiphany. And that is what has most captured my heart for this day.

Epiphany means “manifestation” or, perhaps “striking appearance.” It’s also called the Theophany, which means “a vision of God.”

Here we get the culmination of the nativity story. It’s the day the wise ones show up with their strange and in some ways terrible gifts.

Of the various Christian holidays I’ve always liked Christmas best. Easter has all those powerful birth, death, renewal themes which can capture the imagination, and truly guide us toward our true destiny. At the same time it is easily corrupted by near lies, a literalism that becomes about escaping the bonds of the flesh. It becomes the worst of those stories we tell to pretend what is, isn’t.

Christmas, just as rooted in more ancient things as Easter, is always about a birth of a human being. It is about hope and wonder in ordinary things, the most miraculous and ordinary thing of all for us: the birth of a child. And it is much harder to make things of it that are not helpful.

Epiphany is the feastival of showing up and witnessing what is, along with dreams of what might be. It is the celebration of what happens when we wake up to what is actually going on since the creation of the stars themselves. And find ourselves invited into something.

For me in my Buddhist understanding of the Christian story the Epiphany is a celebration of what happens when we let go of our grasping and instead tumble into the way things are. Haunted by those gifts, of course. Birth and death are so close together that they are like the two sides of a single hand. That’s the way things are. Miracle. Ordinary. Life and death as one thing. All of history from the beginning to the end collapsed into this moment.

A moment of noticing, a moment of seeing that child as the very face of God.

Kind of wonderful.