Epiphany

God appears in the most unlikely of places.... This whole world is the most unlikely of places.

On the second Sunday after Christmas and the surrounding days. Great Yule and Christmas collapse, or rather transform into the ill celebrated season of Epiphany, We don't do so well with Epiphany in the West. In this unmystical hemisphere it is merely the end of Christmas, but what it is, is the three weeks that are headlined (and guarded) by the Magi (Magoi, yes, magicians, wizards, enchanters) who came to visit and bestow gifts upon the infant Jesus. In the story they disappear at the same time Jesus, Joseph and Mary, all leaving the soon to be endangered Bethlehem. I'd like to think they notified the townspeople so they could save their own children. I'd like to think the wise men took Jesus with them. There is the old legend of Jesus studying among the druids and I don't know why this shouldn't be a legend to. The point of Epiphany is that this once privately Jewish savior, belonging to one people's story, is now the Christ and belongs to the whole world, learning wisdom from all corners, even at the feat of these wizards.

This is out of the order of things. These men have nothing to do with Judaism or with its prophecies and expectations. They are quite other. Surely what they mean when they say God is something shattering, something beyond what Joseph and Mary and all their friends knew, something, someone, beyond their theology. Beyond the Christian one two, most suddenly. Epiphany celebrates that, while all sorts of people like to define God and creation, both are beyond definition. They cannot be defined, only entered into.

The next two weeks of Epiphany celebrate the Baptism of Christ, which is also the day I celebrate my formal entry into 1734, and then Wedding at Cana. Wikipedia goes into greater length about what Epiphany means:

The word Epiphany is from Koine Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epipháneia, meaning manifestation or appearance. It is derived from the verb φαίνειν, phainein, meaning "to appear."[20] In classical Greek it was used for the appearance of dawn, of an enemy in war, but especially of a manifestation of a deity to a worshiper (a theophany). In the Septuagint the word is used of a manifestation of the God of Israel (2 Maccabees 15:27).[21] In the New Testament the word is used in 2 Timothy 1:10 to refer either to the birth of Christ or to his appearance after his resurrection, and five times to refer to his Second Coming.[21]

Alternative names for the feast in Greek include τα Θεοφάνια, ta Theopháneia "Theophany" (a neuter plural rather than feminine singular), η Ημέρα των Φώτων, i Iméra ton Fóton (modern Greek pronunciation), hē Hēméra tōn Phṓtōn (restored classical pronunciation), "The Day of the Lights", and τα Φώτα, ta Fóta, "The Lights".[22].... Wikipedia

Throughout the days of Yule we experienced the Divine in the horror of Nidhogg about the world tree, gnawing as us and calling us to go deeper. We experience him in the paradox at the world tree of the Trickster and Child, of Odin offering himself to himself and on the New Year we stand between the doors of Janus, Saturn looking to the past and Hermes to the future. Now, on this day, we are invited to witness the appearance of God again, in a baby held by its mother, in a baptism, at a wedding, in every aspect of life, for what Epiphany is really coming to teach us is that, in all of life, if we have eyes for it, and have put away our presuppositions, God is standing, ready to be seen.