It seems almost constitutionally impossible to be Irish and not be a lover of words and with one side of the family littered with Morans and Linehans, it is understandable that I am and always have been a logophile.

When my children were old enough to ambulate without the help of furniture or a parent’s hand or some repurposed cardboard box turned sliding push toy, we used to play a game that consisted merely of running, dodging, ball throwing, and oh yes, squealing. The only equipment needed was a soft, slightly deflated plastic ball the size of a grade schooler’s noggin. The rules were simple enough. They required no inside lid of a game box for instructions. It was tag meets dodgeball. One person (99% of the time moi) is “it” and has the ball. All other players are targets (or more accurately the squealers and the screamers). The chaser runs after the squealers and the screamers and tries to throw the ball and hit one of them. That’s it. Except for one squeal-inducing addition. You had to hit the squealer in one specific part of the anatomy otherwise you were still “it.”

Although I fancy myself as the inventor and namer of the game, my guess is that it dates back to the Paleolithic times when there were no Walmart or Target or Sporting Goods stores and the underestimatedly creative Neanderthals used to run around chasing their little ones and throwing brown balls made from Osha root or sun-baked balls made out of animal poop at the glutei maximi of their progeny. Thus, in honor of the end target we called their favorite childhood game Fanny Ball which was the reason for all the squeals and screams.

Now that wordy, labyrinthine story has next to nothing to do with what I want to write about except that logophiles acutely hear the sounds, rhymes, rhythms, and puns in the spoken word and revel in wordplay or word association.

TRUE CONFESSIONS: I’m a big fan of the fanny words. Yep. Guilty as self-charged. Nope, I’m not thinking of that cheeky list of synonyms in the collective unconscious of children that universally evoke giggles: butt, buttocks, posterior, ass, derriere, keister, heinie, tush, rear end, behind, bottom, buns. What I have in mind are those shiny, elegant words like epiphany, diaphany, hierophany, and theophany.

Known in some communities as Little Christmas and Theophany, the Feast known as Epiphany in Western Christianity is a commemoration and celebration of the manifestation of Jesus as the Christ to the Gentile magi from the east. They have predictably come again this year in search of “the King of the Jews” as written about in the Gospel of Matthew. When we look at the etymology of the words noted above we notice that the suffix of each in English is –phany which in the original Koine Greek meant manifestation or appearance. The verb form in Greek and Latin means variously to show, reveal, manifest, and appear. Whereas epiphany means to appear before, diaphany means to show through, hierophany refers to an appearance of the sacred, and theophany means a showing of the Divine.

I have stated elsewhere how the Christmas challenge of the 13th-14th-century German mystic and theologian Meister Eckhart to his own Christian community continues to be our challenge eight hundred years later. He said, in essence, what good is Christmas if we reduce it to nothing more than a yearly “remember when” (Jesus of Nazareth was born) instead of a “remember, how”: how and where will we give birth to the Christ today and tomorrow and tomorrow’s tomorrow? What will that labor look like? What will it involve or ask of us? And the inference is that if we only play “remember when”, then we have largely failed to understand that the truth of Christmas, like the truth of all the chief Christian mysteries from creation to resurrection, is a human imperative, an embodied and ongoing practice for us.

I believe the same is true when it comes to the Feast of the Epiphany. What good is Epiphany if we never even take the time to look up to gaze at the starfields which the Psalmist sings are “telling the glory of God” (the word contemplation, con — with + templum — temple, refers to aligning one’s life on earth with that of the heavenly temple or template)? What’s the use of celebrating the arrival of three wise guys from the east at the post-natal unit of someone’s backyard stable if we never dare to make the journey (interiorly and exteriorly) toward what or whom is worthy of our homage? What’s the point of recounting Matthew’s Epiphany story if we are too high and mighty or too busy to relearn how to kneel in awe or to be reverent especially toward the most brittle and defenseless among us in whom Christ takes up residence? Why celebrate the Feast of Epiphany when we fail, to use the words of Annie Dillard, “to cultivate a healthy poverty” so that we can sense and see the theophanic nature of all reality and the theophanic reality of nature?

What does the familiar story of Epiphany have to say to us today? What might it be inviting us to see or do? For Christians, Epiphany involves recognizing the embodiment of Divine Love come to awaken, enliven, and liberate us now and forever not as atomized individuals but as members of one another and in kinship with all the earth. Where and in whom do we see the radiance of God’s life showing? And are our lives diaphanous enough that it shows through us? It suggests that life is a sacred journey into the unknown, which involves risks, and requires taking our eyes off our own navels long enough not only to see the starlight but also to feel the pain and possibilities it illuminates on our earth. Writer James Carroll once wrote, “Contemplation is not seeing things differently. It’s a different way of seeing.” Epiphany invites us to a different way of seeing. What might it mean to look with the eyes of our heart out onto the world? Perhaps it will mean recognizing what matters most or sensing the intimate relationship between the visible and invisible worlds.

Epiphany can be the impetus for us to reflect on whether we are living life as an “entitled getter” or a “grateful giver.” If the latter, we will dare to take inventory of our lives and loves by asking, “What is the gift or gifts I will bring? What gift or gifts will I offer as my great giveaway for the good of others, for the good of all the earth, for the good of God from whom all blessings flow?” I don’t mean great in the eyes of the world, but great in terms of it coming consciously and intentionally from deep within us as an oblation, being heartfelt, and having the personal signature that is unique to each of us. A gift not given is no gift. It’s a waste. No gift is too small. All our gifts, if given sincerely, contain a piece of us and are of equal value and uniquely appreciated just as were the gold, frankincense, and myrrh brought to the boon child. One of our responsibilities and honors as companions is to acknowledge, call forth, and celebrate the gifts each of us have to give.

Including but wandering beyond the Christian community, I believe Epiphany bears gifts for us all. The wise men from the east noticed, beheld, listened to, followed, and discovered what the star illuminated. These actions are integral to a contemplative way of being in the world whereby we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and susceptible to both the ecstasy and agony of what is before us but often fail to see. The symbol of the wise men (in some versions they are depicted as Kings) traveling a great distance to kneel before a vulnerable newborn, can inspire us to look for the numinous that shines through the seemingly ordinary. My Celtic forebears emphasized and encouraged people to pay attention and to be on the lookout for the “thin places” where the veil between this world and the golden world becomes diaphanous. Let us learn from  another German mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg who said, “The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw— and knew I saw— all things in God and God in all things.”

The history of humankind, let alone the history of spirituality, suggests that these simple, real, usually unexpected, and profound experiences of hierophany and theophany have been happening to humans for a couple hundred thousand years. I can imagine that after the Neanderthals finished their game of gluteus maximus sphera, young and old alike lying on their backs on a carpet of field grass, watching the night sky show off as it pulled oohs and aahs out of the gazers’ mouths and then evoked the quietest quiet that silence can know.

The story of Epiphany and human history indicate that these sacred glimpses of the Real are no more liable to happen in the splash of fireworks or a blazing sunset than in a room crowded with people (and maybe farm animals) taking a long loving look at a baby in a crib. In fact, it seems these ineffable experiences tend to happen at the most unexpected times and in the least expected places. Poet Ezra Pound said that beauty likes neglected places.

Having had the privilege as a spiritual director of catching and holding the stories of so many extraordinarily ordinary and ordinarily extraordinary people, I know that humans have these experiences. I have had them myself as have you. I call it being on the porch of mystery and I know I had little, if anything, to do with getting there. I have learned not to analyze these moments, not to try to squeeze the meaning out of them greedily, but simply to stop and let them take me in. I don’t presume to know what they mean. I only know that they happen from time to time and that in these ineffable moments, fleeting or extended, I am the least self-conscious and yet the most fully myself.

Sometimes, these epiphanic experiences connect us to the beautiful, the enchanting, the exquisite and make us weep from the wonder of it all. Other times they might put us in touch with the tragic, the devastating, the sorrowful mysteries of life and living and make us weep from the pathos of it all. In each case, there is a sense of being part of some deep truth that, should one try to communicate it later, could only be alluded to with images or similes. With me, the visitations of truth that carry hints of the Holy have always come with no warning, through no initiation on my part. I know that these epiphanies are “special” but not unusual, that they happen to all kinds of people and not to any one type of person. When graced with an epiphany, I know that there is nothing better to do than to receive them with awe as sheer gift. My suspicion is that they are happening all around us all the time if we but had the wise eyes to see.

I know that when these experiences or extended moments happen, that what is happening on the inside of people might not seem to match what appears to others to be happening on the outside. In other words, it might be the knowing glance of a lover or a stranger that suddenly breaks us open or a bird on a windowsill or a piece of music that becomes an aperture to mystery, or the simplest gesture of a couple sixty-five years married holding hands that awakens us to the Elusive Presence,1 to the really Real, the truly True, the Extravagant Love and their derivatives: deep peace, radical amazement, praise, compassion, or the feeling of sacred kinship with all the living beings of earth.

Whatever the epiphany, whatever the truth revealed not to the mind but to the heart, these diaphanous moments when we find ourselves standing before the mystery or held within it, always send us home by another way.

1 The term elusive presence comes from Samuel Terrien’s book The Elusive Presence: Toward a New Biblical Theology, 1978.

ARTWORK: by my favorite illustrator Julie Vivas from her book The Nativity.