The Golden Thread of Epiphany

Home another way

Most of my posts are short fiction, but occasionally I write liturgical-living related reflections and essays like this piece. If you are interested in more of my nonfiction, you can find it here.

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Photo by Caleb Stokes on Unsplash

The Magi of my childhood were little porcelain figures, so minutely detailed that the etchings on their white surface seemed to ripple like windswept robes. My siblings and I moved them from place to place around the house during the Twelve Days of Christmas, until Epiphany, when they finally landed in the nativity set on our hearth.

I knew the annually-repeated details of the story: they brought gold for Jesus’ Kingship, frankincense for His Priesthood, and myrrh for His Death. I knew that every year, without fail, my dad would explain that myrrh was a “balm” before laughing about Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which myrrh is mistaken as a “bomb”. The Magi were part of the scenery, a memorable ritual of Christmas, an interesting aside in the narrative of Christ’s birth.

But I didn’t really get the Magi. In my mind, they existed in an ambiguous space between myth and reality, between the little figurines in my childhood living room and the real people who supposedly traipsed across a decent portion of the globe following a star, with the intent of visiting a Jewish peasant baby.

My mother was an intellectual, and I knew from her research that some scholars thought the Magi were Zoroastrian astronomers from Persia. Others thought that when the Magi met Jesus, he was a toddler in Egypt rather than an infant in Bethlehem. Still others speculated that the Star of Bethlehem was a conjunction of Jupiter and Venus that made Jupiter appear especially bright in the night sky. (As a middle schooler I learned that some less-scholarly people on the internet thought the Star of Bethlehem was an alien spaceship, but I never mentioned that to my mom.)

Then there was the theological explanation of the Magi and their role as “firstfruits of the nations” being “made worthy of the heritage of Israel”.¹ They were the New Testament’s first hint that Christ was the savior not just of Israel but the world.

All of these ideas and traditions swirled around in the recesses of my mind, dormant most of the year, only to be pulled out and mulled over every year in early January.

Then, in 2018, I became pregnant with a baby who was due to be born on Epiphany.

Our first baby was due on the feast of light and revelation, the Divine manifestation to the nations. The first time that the God-man reached out to those outside of the people of Israel. It seemed so perfect, the best possible welcome for our new little one.

A few months later, I lost that baby, a little girl we named Teresa Rose.

When that Epiphany, Teresa’s due date, arrived, I was fortunate enough to be pregnant again, but I was crippled by the fear of losing another child. There was less cheer and much more anxiety on that Epiphany, when our grief was still raw and our future so uncertain.

Yet, in spite of my fears, eventually we welcomed a healthy baby into our arms. We were overjoyed, although no amount of joy could quite erase the grief of never having all of our babies in our arms on this side of Heaven.

Miscarriage is not one of the sufferings I expected in my life. But when do we ever receive the suffering we expect, the suffering we think we are prepared for or which we could handle with grace? Those are not the sufferings which are asked of us.

The real difficulties that come – viruses during Christmas, becoming caretakers of parents, financial hardship, miscarriage, mental illness, the large and small tragedies of life – often seem so prosaic compared to the bold and holy sufferings of many saints.

But for the Magi, scratchy grains of desert sand chafing in the folds of robes, sore muscles from arduous camel rides, sweat from the midday sun and chills from a windy night, must have seemed prosaic as well – too lowly to be of notice to God. Yet it was through the scratchy sand, the sore muscles, the sweat and chills, that God accomplished His Will in very real people in a very real time and place.

We know little of the Magis’ lives before the Nativity, and even less of their lives afterward, but that they returned home by another way. That is the life of a Christian – truly, the life of every human, but particularly that of a Christian – a seeking after truth, an encounter with the Lord, and then a transformation.

The Magi departed from Jesus, never, as far as we know, to see him again. Something similar may be the case for us; many people far holier than I am have spent years, even decades, without a tangible spiritual sense of God’s presence.² After the encounter and the transformation, we may be asked to walk for a time, seemingly alone.

For most of us, our lives are comprised of a series of epiphanies, small and often unpredictable moments of revelation and closeness with God. We drift and come back, like a thread moving away from the cloth only to dive back in again and again. We are too close now to see the design our lives are making, but in the lens of eternity, someday, the image will be clear. We will see how our recurring encounters and our everyday struggles are a small part of a tapestry, interwoven in the story of the universe.

Though times of dryness, of apparent separation from and aching for God, may make up the bulk of our days, it is the encounters, brief though they are in our physical time, that color and direct our lives.

I have encounters, rarer than they used to be, in which I receive a sense of peace, of joy, of the good feelings that I experienced early on in my faith life. But, more often than not, my encounters come with pain. Most of them are small, the discomforts and stresses and frustrations that are part and parcel with family life. Some of them are larger, and involve watching loved ones suffer without being able to help. So often I forget that the cross I must take up is not a mysterious, tragic cross that someday I might have to bear. It’s the cross of today, of this moment, inconsequential or frustrating as it may seem. It’s not the cross I would choose or the one that seems the most palatable or prestigious or holy. My cross is not aesthetic, but it is sanctifying. Or it can be, if I let it.

 I try to come to the Lord often, to put myself in proximity to His grace, even when I can’t feel it working. I come bringing no gold, frankincense, or myrrh – no gift but my sleep-deprived, frazzled self, and I leave changed, though often the change is imperceptible to me. Nevertheless I keep coming back, like thread following a needle, diving back through the cloth before setting off in another direction, until my thread is done and its design is complete.

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1. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph #528

2. St. John of the Cross and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, to name just two