Caspar, Balthazar and Melchior are said to have arrived at their destination today. They had an epiphany, according to Matthew, when they laid eyes upon the promised Messiah. This is the Twelfth Night, the twelfth day of Christmas and forevermore the Feast of The Epiphany.
It is a fundamental human story that revelation is a thing we must travel to…a progress from one place to another. We must hit the road for the “aha moment.” The word is from the Greek and it means manifestation…a sudden and dramatic insight. We leave our everyday perceptions and suddenly encounter the essence of something. We often use the phrase, “it dawned on me,” to describe the sudden illumination of an epiphany.
It seems that epiphanies occur in literature and history as a person travels. A progress from one place to another …a progress to the bright light of awareness. Epiphanies can be as negative as heartbreak or as uplifting as the experience of the Three Kings. One thing is sure, you must be moving to have one. You must be a seeker.
An epiphany comes when least expected and it comes after a long planned voyage. It is perfectly unscheduled .
An epiphany that changed my life occurred in the sixties when I suddenly KNEW that I was being lied to by the popular culture that stipulated that awareness was the result of altered consciousness. Authors coopted the religious experiences of ancient cultures to argue that God could be found by the use of psychedelics, fasting, or even, loud music. I remember thinking, what if our great gift and our road to the divine was good old everyday consciousness ? What if we were already knee deep in the divinity that was all around us?
A more recent epiphany made it manifest that every turning point in one’s life is epiphanic in nature…it is a light that shines on the road.
It is telling that Shakespeare’s play was described by one critic as, ” an invitation to lighten up.” The Bard gets it.
Olio Folio 