Robert Barron - Be Attentive to Epiphanies
Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to one of my favorite feasts of the year, the Feast of Epiphany. Epiphany, from a Greek word meaning "intense appearance". "Phanein" means "to appear" in Greek, and "epi," which means "on top of," is a way of intensifying. Remember I talked to you before about, in the Our Father, we have the little phrase "ton arton, ton epiousion," and it means "supersubstantial bread". "Epiousion". So "epiphanein" means something that's appeared but in a very intense way, not just getting our attention but revealing something of enormous significance. That's what epiphany is about. For the wise men of course, it was first the star that was this extraordinary appearance, but see, much more than that.
The point of the story is it wasn't the star that was the real epiphany. It was this baby. They went looking for a king and they find this little child. That was the "epiphania". That was the extraordinary appearance. Whenever we come to this feast day, I think of James Joyce, the great twentieth-century Irish novelist, a man who was certainly formed in Catholic thought. Abandoned the Church, but I think it's fair to say he never really left Catholicism. It just haunted his whole imagination. And in his famous autobiographical novel, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," he realizes, okay, I'm not to be a priest, but I'm to be a kind of priest. Because he said his vocation would be to report epiphanies when he saw them.
Now, his great example, and you go to that book to find it; it's one of the most beautiful scenes in twentiethcentury literature, Joyce spies this young woman standing off of the shore in Dublin, and then he describes her in her beauty, and she's gazing out to sea. And then she turns to him, and for a while she takes in his gaze, and she looks out again to the open sea. And then the young character says, "Oh, heavenly God". Well, that was the woman that became his wife eventually in real life. But the point was seeing her that day was "epiphania". It was this intense showing forth, and Joyce was so impressed by that he said, look, I found my vocation as a writer is to notice epiphanies and then to describe them.
Now, Joyce was a great literary genius. He was able to describe them in these extraordinary ways. But think of someone too like Flannery O'Connor. I think her vocation was very similar. She said, "my books are all about the breakthrough of grace". Now, usually refused, she said, but she like Joyce was noticing these epiphanies, these moments of intense manifestation. I think the feast day, everybody, is meant to signal to us that we should be attentive in a similar way to these moments of breakthrough when something shows itself so powerfully that ultimately it speaks to us of God.
Now, I'm going to give some examples from my own life. If you've been following me, either through these sermons or my other writings and so on, maybe you've heard these stories before, but they're important to me just to show what I mean by this epiphany. The first one, I've told this story many times, as a little kid at Fenwick High School outside Chicago and hearing for the first time about St. Thomas Aquinas and one of his arguments for God's existence. I took it in, but it was more than just, oh, another lesson, like "Isn't that mildly interesting"? No. For me, it was like an epiphany of truth. It was a hyper-intense manifestation of the truth. It so galvanized me that it sent me on a kind of mission.
And it's no joke to say I've never really left that path to this moment recording these words. It's because as a young kid, I had an epiphany, this manifestation of truth. You know a second one, it happened around the same time, when I was in high school, and for the first time I encountered Shakespeare. In class, we read "Romeo and Juliet". We just assigned different sections of it and we read it out loud, and I understood probably 9 percent of what I was reading. But that first encounter with Shakespeare was like an epiphany to me.
It was so beautiful and it was so strange in its complexity that I was just in awe of it. It was a source of wonder to me that such a thing could exist. It was an epiphania, this extraordinary manifestation. I know I've told you before about the event happened to me June 12, 1989, when I arrived in Paris for the first time to begin my doctoral studies, and despite my fatigue and jet lag and everything else, I went down to Notre Dame and looked up at the great north rose window. And it's a stunningly beautiful thing. I mean, anyone that would see it would admit that. But for me, it was more than that. It was an epiphania.
It was a showing forth of such splendor and such transcendent beauty that it sent me on a mission. I mean, I returned every day to that spot to look at it. Most of my life, I've used that image in my speaking and preaching and writing. It was an intensely powerful manifestation. That's an epiphany. I think just recently in a sermon I talked about this, but the first time, again, I was probably in high school or college, the first time I heard Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone". Not just a song I liked. There were a lot of songs before that that I liked, that were appealing to me. I was born and raised on rock and roll, kind of what we call now classic rock, and there's all these songs. I listen to them now on Spotify. I go right to 1970s rock or classic rock.
That's what I still like to listen to. But Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" was so much more than that. It wasn't just a song I liked. It's a song that shook the foundations of my life. It just opened up door after door and window after window. It was an epiphania. It was a showing forth of something of great intensity. I'll give you another one. Many years later now when I'm filming for the CATHOLICISM series, and we went all over the world and went to marvelous places. They were all terrific. But there was one trip that we took. The first leg of it was to India, we were filming for the Mother Teresa episode, and then on the way home we stopped in Africa.
Well, in Kolkata, which is the most shockingly desperate city I've ever been in, I'd never experienced anything like the poverty and destitution of Kolkata, and in the very heart of that, the very heart of it, there is Mother sisters; they're still there at the motherhouse. Mother Teresa herself is buried there, but the sisters are still based there. And we filmed them as they were working in some of the worst conditions I've ever seen, doing some of the most menial, difficult work I've ever seen. What I remember was a very young sister, and she was taking maggots out of someone's ear as we were filming. But here was the epiphany. It wasn't so much just the work they were doing.
The epiphany was the smiles on the faces of these young women as they were in that city doing that work. I mean, we filmed it, and it's one of the glories I think of that series to see those smiling faces. That was a manifestation of the good at such an extraordinarily intense level that it was an epiphany. I mentioned that that same trip we went from India to Africa, because we were filming for June 3 in Namugongo. That's in Uganda. It was the site of the martyrdom of Charles Lwanga and his companions. You know that terrible, wonderful story of this young man and his companions who didn't give into this tyrannical king. They defended their Christian faith, and for it they were put to death.
Charles Lwanga was burned to death on that spot. And now today (what?) one-hundred-forty-some years later? Upwards of a million people descend every year on that spot, Namugongo, in the shadow of the spot where he was martyred, to celebrate their Catholic faith. I don't think anything in that whole process of filming that series impressed me more than that. It was an epiphania. It was a showing forth of something of extraordinary power. I'll give you one more. This was, oh gosh, twenty-five years ago now. I was on retreat in Big Sur. There's a Camaldolese monastery. These are very serious, very focused religious, and the monastery is right on the seashore. South of San Francisco, Monterey, that kind of area. And you're assigned your own little hut when you're there, and each one looks out over the Pacific Ocean.
So at the end of the day, sun goes down. And at the time I was from Chicago, where there's light pollution everywhere. I had seen stars of course, but as I looked out from my little back area there, and I'm just looking out over the Pacific Ocean, for the first time really in my life, I saw the stars the way they appear in these astronomical charts and photographs. I saw the splendor of the stars really for the first time in my life, and I had this overwhelming sense of just being this little tiny speck in this infinite ocean of time and space. I mean, that experience has never left me. To this day it affects me. It was an epiphania.
Now everybody, my point is, and this really was James Joyce's point, because his character, remember, after he saw the girl, he said, "Oh, heavenly God". Because see, when you have a heightened experience of the good (that's what happened to me in Kolkata and Namugongo), you got a heightened experience of the beautiful (that's the north rose window), you got a heightened experience of the true (that's Thomas Aquinas), when that happens to you, you are placed in the presence of the source of all truth and all goodness and all beauty.
Those epiphanies are those moments when it's as though the light that's behind all things suddenly shines forth with a particular radiance. I mean, maybe the best example of this in the New Testament is the Transfiguration, when suddenly they saw the light that was behind the humanity of Jesus. Well see, we have these experiences too. We can't control them. I mean not one of those experiences I just described is something that I could control or I could make happen again. No, it was like a grace. So, two things. Go back now to the magi. They had an epiphania. The first was seeing the star, but the second was seeing the child. But they had spent who knows how long (days, months, years?) surveying the night sky looking for signs.
Well, that's a large part of the spiritual life everybody. That's why we speak of prayer day in and day out, attending Mass week in, week out, maybe day in, day out, returning again and again. What are we doing when we pray? We're being attentive. We're being attentive, we're looking. Then the second thing: the magi, once they saw the great star, they moved, they acted. Once the Lord breaks through into your life, savor that moment and follow it all the way to the source of what is true and good and beautiful. That's the best way to respond to an epiphania. To an epiphany. And God bless you.