I woke up this morning like I have every day of 2024: groggy and scrambling to sit up while coughing uncontrollably. When the spell passed I leaned back on my nest of pillows, staring thoughtlessly into space. I was already wiped out, discouraged that the day seemed stacked against me again. Was this dazed mental state just a residual effect of the nighttime cough meds? Was it the exhaustion of still being under the weather? Why did everything seem so flat, so relentlessly grey?
Rolling over, I picked up my phone (the lateness of the hour serving as further confirmation of my impaired state), and clicked into my email, scrolling and squinting at the headings. Over-ambitiously, I opened a news summary, dutifully perusing while not absorbing a single word. Eventually I closed it.
Before I put my phone down, one title caught my eye: “From wonder to wonder,” a newsletter from James K.A. Smith, the editor of Image Journal. Cynically, I assumed it would be too much. Probably too wordy and too heady for a sick girl first thing in the morning. But in contrast to my interior state of grey, the accompanying artwork was vibrant and inviting, and the words that followed were grounded and hopeful.
“Epiphany is about manifestation, an unveiling of glory, but it seems to me that living into Epiphany is about bringing this incarnate attention to the entirety of creation. To live ‘epiphanically’ (?!) is to see how the human and the created have been hallowed, redeemed, unveiled for what they are: sites of divine dwelling and disclosure vibrating with shekinah, God’s presence. So a curious inversion happens at Epiphany: the manifestation of glory rebounds to make the mundane shine brightly. In the wake of Incarnation, where is God not?”
I was beginning to wake up.
Slipping into my robe I made my way downstairs, intending to grab a cup of coffee and head back to my nest. Mom was reading quietly on the couch; Dad was shifting back and forth from sitting at the table with his customary book stack, to checking the crispness of the bacon in the oven. We exchanged morning greetings, and I found myself joining them, giving vent to my frustrations over still feeling sick. Dad continued puttering around in the kitchen, scrambling some eggs and putting a few GF biscuits in the oven, and then we were all at the table with this simple Saturday breakfast that he’d so lovingly made. The mundane was shining brightly, and foggy-brained or not, I was enjoying it. Epiphany.
As Dad started talking about the things he was reading and the things he was subsequently realizing, I started to pay closer attention. Though unfamiliar with the season of Epiphany, he was having epiphanies and there was nothing grey about his humility and sense of wonder. As if to complement Dad’s enthusiasm, the amaryllis bulb on the table was daring to open four blooms simultaneously, dauntlessly pressing forth her vibrant and quiet beauty. More mundanity, more glory. Epiphany.
The world is still dark; some days are still grey. But there really is something to paying attention to beauty, to the surprises the keep us awake and holding onto hope. There is something hospitable about leaning into grace, into mystery. The light of Epiphany “is not so much a light we see as the Light we learn to see by. The mystery isn’t solved, but deepened; and we are invited to dwell in it.”1 We are invited into clear-eyed wonder, wooed by mystery, and buoyed by the presence Immanuel to “Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts.”2 Joy doesn’t make sense when I consider all the facts, and yet I want to grow a more resilient hope, a deeper curiosity, and an incarnate attention. Truly, glory can shine from anywhere!
Happy Epiphany, friends!
From James K.A. Smiths’ newsletter, “From wonder to wonder”
From “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” by Wendell Berry
I, too, was caught up in Smith’s newsletter and returned to it a few times throughout yesterday. Particularly, “ In the wake of Incarnation, where is God not?” I want to add an exclamation point to it. Oh, that every day would be an epiphany!