This is the church season of Epiphany, commemorated by the light in the sky and the wise men being led to find the baby Jesus, the new being in their midst. One of my fascinations with church seasons is that we are not meant to hold them safely at arm’s length, and discuss them in some academic way. No, the invitation is to take the season inside, to ask, how is this sacred time a story in my own life? Much scarier this way.
One meaning of “epiphany” is “manifestation”—what is suddenly showing up that has not been there before. This is maybe the second part of those often hapless New Year’s resolutions: We come into the year brimming with intentions… but unless they are manifested somehow, they remain just a wish list. To manifest is to put muscle into it, to take something to a level of action.
But I don’t think manifestation is all about us, our effort, all the time. Far from it. Lisa Belkin has a lovely article in Thursday’s New York Times about careers, and how various threads of careers manifest over time—slowly, weirdly, randomly—and how we can only see them in retrospect. The building blocks that were there all the time come into focus, and often with them, the sense of an unseen hand, of something other than our ego and efforts, helping steer.
So Epiphany invites us to both manifest the new in our lives and also to honor and recognize the slow, life-long emergence of that which is most aligned with who we really are. We are cumulative creatures, and in my impatience, I sometimes forget that.
Still, rather than just wander hopefully, I want some sort of instruction. And I can look to the wise men in the Epiphany story for one of the better tips for any new year. After they paid homage to Jesus, and gave their gifts, they were warned in a dream not to return the way they came (since King Herod was looking to kill the child). Instead, they returned home “by another way.”
There is our Epiphany invitation: to think of the ways we are invited to go home… but by another way. (Avoiding, ideally, the Herod parts in all of us that are suspicious of the new.) What do you think is your “another way” for 2008, and how might you take the first step?