Epiphany

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany in the Christian Church. The word "epiphany" comes from an old Greek word meaning "manifestation" or "striking appearance." In ancient Greece, before Christianity, it was a term used to document occasions when Greek gods and goddesses manifested themselves to human beings on earth.

In the modern Greek Orthodox Church, the Feast of the Epiphany is a broad and encompassing celebration of God becoming man: the birth of the baby Jesus, the Magi visiting from Persia, and, especially, Jesus' baptism in the Jordan River. In the Roman Catholic Church, however, the focus is on the image of the wise men bringing gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and gold to the infant Jesus, guided from their homeland of Iran by a shining star.

Around the time Irish writer James Joyce was defecting from the Roman Catholic Church, he was investing secular meaning into the word "epiphany." In his early 20s, he drew up little sketches, sort of like "prose poems," in which he illustrated epiphanies. He explained to his brother Stanislaus that epiphanies were sort of "inadvertent revelations," and said they were "little errors and gestures — mere straws in the wind — by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal." He also wrote that the epiphany was the sudden "revelation of the whatness of a thing," the moment when "the soul of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant."

It was a literary device that James Joyce would use in every story in his collection Dubliners (1914), a technique that he would become known for and that many modern writers would emulate. In his biography of James Joyce, Richard Ellmann writes: "Arrogant yet humble too, [the epiphany] claims importance by claiming nothing; it seeks a presentation so sharp that comment by the author would be an interference. It leaves off the veneer of gracious intimacy with the reader, of concern that he should be taken into the author's confidence, and instead makes the reader feel uneasy and culpable if he misses the intended but always unstated meaning, as if he were being arraigned rather than entertained. The artist abandons himself and his reader to the material."

Joyce's Dubliners ends with a story set at a party for the Feast of the Epiphany, "The Dead," and that story ends: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." 

----------------------

I have had at least a few "little epiphanies" in my life.

But I'm still confused that so many Christians, especially those who believe the literal words from the Bible as being actual events, that the wise men followed a star in the east.  If they were from the east, the star leading to Bethlehem would have to have been in the west. This and many details are argued around translations from Greek for early documentation. But many Christians will be celebrating the arrival of the Three Wise Men coming to see the baby Jesus, a new king.