Happy Feast of the Epiphany! I just love this fitting feastly bookend for the Christmas season, when the “small” discovery of God incarnate at Christmas enters into our messy human history.

Additionally, “We Three Kings” has always been one of my favorite Christmas carols to sing, and I really belt it out when given the opportunity. I just think it’s the best little metaphor for the spiritual life. In the verses, there is something of the rhythm (and drudgery) of everyday life, with all its ups and downs:

We three kings of orient are
Bearing gifts we traverse afar
Field and fountain
Moor and mountain
Following yonder star

And it plays a bit like a forced march, traversing field and fountain, moor and mountain, with the various commitments, responsibilities, and surprises that assail us in everyday life.

And yet, so much of daily grind is the result of the ideals that we follow, the “yonder star” of following God and providing for family or building community, of nurturing the relationships we care deeply about. We sacrifice for others and are nourished by the sacrifice of others. This is what it is like to live in real community.

But even though we’ve been living this pilgrimage of sacrificial love, when the star actually arrives it always causes us to pause: “O, OOOOO!”

It’s a bit like a revelation in a Flannery O’Connor short story, showing up unexpectedly and almost violently, as we “contemplate for first time the tremendous frontiers of [our] true country.” We’ve just been drudging along, doing our little part each and every day, and suddenly everything opens up, everything is bathed in the light of God’s presence, totally unexpected:

O star of wonder, star of night
Star with royal beauty bright
Westward leading, still proceeding
Guide us to thy perfect light

Guide us to thy perfect light, until all we are is thy light! As we grow closer to God and begin to resemble the light that draws us in, a light we see “darkly” but one day, on the other side of death, will see with perfect clarity.

Another one of my favorite, revelatory pieces about the Epiphany is T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi.” Apparently he wrote it in only 45 minutes after attending Feast of the Epiphany Mass (and after downing a half bottle of gin during the writing process). Eliot, who had just converted to Anglo-Catholicism, traces the long arduous journey of the Magi, the pain of their long pilgrimage, and, barely mentioning what they’d found in Bethlehem, how utterly alien they feel upon their arrival back “home.”

Another great revelatory insight: how often the places we once felt at home change after a deep conversion experience, and how we often struggle to put into words the moments where God has visited us (or we have visited God). But perhaps most essentially, how often a real experience of God feels like a “death,” as all we thought we were and all we thought was important (status, money, honor, success, etc.) becomes entirely and ultimately relativized by the absolute Presence of God. It changes us and shatters us, and God slowly and lovingly picks up the pieces and from them, creates us anew (over and over again).

I’ll leave you with the entire poem, as it’s worth a couple slow reads and a quiet reflection on your own life’s pilgrimage. Where are you on the journey? What have you found? What have been your epiphanies, and how have they left you?

Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.