On Epiphany and embracing the unexpected

Merry Christmas! Today the calendar proclaims the feast of Epiphany (though we won't celebrate it liturgically until Sunday, and this year I'm all about the extension of Christmas festivities). Epiphany, the day when wise men from the East came to worship the infant Christ, is not an easy feast.

We tend to sugarcoat our holidays, but really, which one of them is easy? Easter is possible only because it followed a gruesome, brutal execution of an innocent. Christmas turns our thoughts to the hard truth that God is present in the squalor and filth of poverty, a world we'd like to ignore. And Epiphany reminds us that the Glory of God is juxtaposed against giving up all our good plans for security and home and, even, life.

Perhaps Epiphany is particularly hard for me because I have a bad habit of holding onto my well-laid plans the way a raccoon will keep hold of a shiny coin even if it leaves him with his hand in a trap. And Epiphany is full of so much...uncertainty. Imagine the trust it took for the Magi to travel hundreds of miles in search of a prophesied king. Imagine how Saint Joseph felt when told in a dream that an evil monarch had designs on his family. Imagine how Mary, who must have spent months preparing her home for the arrival of her child, must have felt when she was asked to abandon it to become a refugee in a foreign land. Imagine how it would have felt that God revealed this plan not to her at all, but to Joseph, leaving her to trust her mortal husband to share the will of her Divine Spouse. Imagine both of them hearing of the agony of the Jewish parents they left behind, whose children were ripped from their mother's arms as the first innocents to die in defense of an innocent King.

I wouldn't take well to this kind of disruption in my life. I couldn't even, as a writer, put my characters through that kind of hell. I'm too organized and too nice and too...short-sighted. And I don't have any brilliant insights to help you understand this mystery of a feast. I can only point to the radiance that almost pervades the disarray. The wonder that God would use the unpredictability of dreams to save the Holy Family and lead them to safety. The shimmering gold and costly frankincense and myrhh, gifts for a king laid before the weakest, poorest among us: a little baby with no home. The unlikely star, the brightest in the sky, making clear a confusing path.

Trying to grow in virtue takes so much trust. Being a parent takes trust. Being an artist takes trust. Fortunately for me (because otherwise I'd get nowhere in anything), all these facets of my life inform and develop one another. When I learn to trust God about the slow, meandering path I'm taking in gaining patience grain of sand by grain of sand, I'm able to trust Him more easily when my writing dreams get thrown off-kilter. When my children are sick. When my plans fail. When I fail.

And the best things happen when I fail, when I lose myself and my plans, and God leads the way with an unlikely star.

This doesn't make trust much easier...perhaps only as much as a grain of Egyptian sand. But it reminds me that the struggle and the failure and the confusion are worth muddling through.

I'll leave you with three quotes from my adopted mentor, Madeleine L'Engle, because I couldn't choose just one! Honestly, you'll probably glean more wisdom from them than from my entire post...

"I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly."

"The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command.
...I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.
As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss."

"A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."