Sunday, January 5, 2025
The Epiphany of the Lord (observed)
Twelfth Day of Christmas
Twelfth Night
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Suddenly
Rise up in splendor, Jerusalem! Your light has come, the glory of the Lord shines upon you.
Many years we can celebrate Epiphany twice, once on Sunday and then on January 6, if that date falls on a weekday. I don’t know why that is, but I like it. Epiphany has been one of my favorite words for decades, ever since my Valpo freshman comp teacher Kathy Griffin asked us to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce in 1967.
Miss Griffin (we called her Kathy) also facilitated our class in creative cinema (we made our own film, including a scene in which I climbed out of a garbage dumpster at a crucial moment to the soundtrack of “Also Spake Zarathustra,” theme song of the just released 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Paul Kern and I took our film to downtown Chicago for developing. We rode on his motorcycle and were stopped by police, who had followed us for ten minutes in a rainstorm while we changed lanes far too often.
See, darkness covers the earth, and thick clouds cover the peoples but upon you the Lord shines, and over you appears his glory.
Paul and I spent the night in jail, and Kathy came the next day to bail us out. Bawl us out as well, of course. But Kathy was a little wild herself, not much older than we were, and she forgave us quickly. She loved books, and her Freshman Comp class was a highlight of my life then and now. We read James Joyce’s Portrait, and she encouraged us to tear out the pages and carry a chapter or so around with us wherever we went, so we could “absorb” them more easily into our open minds:
To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life. A wild angel appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!
 He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.
He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.
 Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
 Joyce’s words captured me, and my imagination longed to write with abandon as he seemed to. This kind of writing, these driven words, propelled my eighteen-year-old self into epiphany after epiphany, rising up to meet the wondrous sea, the magical sun, refusing to be subdued by the earth – heavy and Vietnam-laden as it was.
Buffy Saint Marie sang, “God is alive, and magic is afoot!” When I went to the required Lutheran chapel services several days each week, I tuned out the liturgies that seemed stale and remembered Joyce and Buffy instead, along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s refrain “… and I am continually awaiting a rebirth of wonder.”
Remembering. Epiphanies rise up, streams of cool water out of the splash pad of my life, suddenly and joyfully refreshing.
And that, viewed from outside the stable, is how we celebrate today and tomorrow. Jesus, filled up with God, turns to each of us and smiles, offers, invites, welcomes. Come to me, all ye who are heavy laden. I will give you rest. Like Miss Griffin only Infinite, Jesus rescues us from jail and from the heavy clay feet we inevitably grow, following sunken footsteps through our lives.
Here’s an epiphany from Acts. Silver and gold have we none, but such as we have, we give thee. In the name of Jesus, rise up and walk. And the cripple, all of a sudden rose, and laughed, ran around for the first time in his life, leaping, jumping – leaping and praising God. What prison could hold those healers? What prison could hold the healed?
How sweet it is to be loved by You.
(Isaiah 60, Psalm 72, Ephesians 3, Matthew 2)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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