“And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them, 

until it came and stopped over the place where the child was.

They were overjoyed at seeing the star, 

and on entering the house

they saw the child with Mary his mother.

They prostrated themselves and did him homage.

Then they opened their treasures 

and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”

An epiphany usually happens in a sudden and dramatic way. We gain a burst of insight, a flash of understanding, or a spark of discovery. It may also happen more gradually, like the dawning of an idea or realization. As we celebrate the Epiphany of the Lord, the revelation of who Jesus is was just beginning with the magi. Guided by the Spirit, the light of Jesus Christ has continued to grow and be more fully grasped. Not only is that a deepening and broadening process in the church and in the world, but is a process that happens in each of our lives, minds, and hearts. I have had many epiphanies in my life, often like a burst of light, that have propelled my relationship with God. The first one, however, was more gradual. 

I was 17 years old and on my senior retreat at the Flaget Center. I had spent the previous summer as a cultural exchange student in Japan. I was intelligent, although I thought myself more intelligent than I was, and I suffered the temptation of youth to see myself discovering ancient mystery as if for the first time. I had made myself the measure of all things and took my international experience as a broadening of horizons. I had a wonderful experience, but I had some recency bias which gave that experience great weight, more than the years of faith practiced and handed on to me by family, friends, and church. In Japan, I had profound moments for which I remain grateful. I explored many Buddhist and Shinto shrines in the mountains on the island of Shikoku outside the city of Matsuyama. Because of this, I started my retreat with the idea that God (or the divine) was an impersonal force that could be accessed through nature and, especially, through paradox. Life was about walking the mountain ridge, balancing paradoxes, so as to remain at the highest point of the journey. I felt a little rebellious and certainly sophisticated with my new and different ideas. Truth, it seemed to me, came from the exotic far away land, not in an old converted high school used as a retreat center. My expectations for the retreat were low. 

You may remember that my parents divorced when I was seven years old after mom had lost three children following my premature birth. My brothers Bradley and Patrick were both born premature, but did not survive, and her fourth pregnancy ended in a late miscarriage. When my dad sat me down to tell me that he and my mom were getting divorced, he also said that, now, I would have to be the man of the house and that if my brothers had lived, they wouldn’t be getting divorced. It is beyond the scope of this article to unpack how profoundly I was affected by those words, but on the retreat, a letter from my dad to me was read aloud in front of all the students. In it, he wrote two things I had never heard in person. The first was that he was sorry for the divorce and the second was that he was proud of me. I was overcome with emotion and despite my fear of what my classmates would think, I broke down sobbing. A remarkable thing happened. Instead of the feared judgment, my classmates surrounded me, embraced me, and comforted me. I experienced being loved. In later reflection, as I was alone walking in the small garden next to the chapel, I understood that somehow God is love, like I had experienced from my classmates. It was just the dawning of an idea, but if God was love, the divine couldn’t be an impersonal force. God had to be a person to be love and to love. It was just the dawning of an idea, a star to follow in the sky, but it has made all the difference in my life.