Sunday, January 07, 2024

Richard Rohr on the Meaning of Epiphany

An epiphany is not an idea. As D.H. Lawrence said, people can do anything they want with an idea, but a truly new experience changes everything. Before you can do anything with it, it does something with you!

Most of us prefer ideas and words; we are afraid of any authentically new experience. Unlike the Magi, we do not tend to allow stars to divert us to a new and unknown place. Most of us stay inside our private castles and avoid such questionable adventures. Yes, we avoid death supposedly, but we also avoid birth. We miss out on the great epiphany.

An epiphany is not an experience that we can create from within, but one that we can only be open to and receive from another. Epiphanies leave us totally out of control and they always demand that we change. We would rather have objectified religion, which leaves us potentially in control and never having to change at all.

Religion without epiphanies becomes digging in your heels; religion with epiphanies becomes living on your heels, ready to go wherever God manifests. One wonders if the Magi ever went back home at all. Home base had been taken from them.

The feast of the Epiphany tells us that from the very beginning Jesus was someone to be personally experienced, and not just mentally agreed upon, proven, accepted, or argued about. The categories are entirely different. True human experience demands that the whole person be present and active. In that light, one wonders how many people really experience things since we are hardly ever present to experience our own experiences.



See also the related Wild Reed posts:
The Feast of the Epiphany
What We Can Learn From the Story of the Magi
We Three . . . Queens
Our Story Too
An Epiphany Blessing
The Magi and Our Journey to Christ
Wakey Wakey
A Story of Searching and Discovery
The Onward Call
Wise Women Also Came
Phillip Clark on the Magi as Archetypes of “Witchy Faith”
The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment

Image: Marion Foliedujour.


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