Brian’s Reflection: Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Feast of the Epiphany/Twelfth Night (Christian)

….. were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.
I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

- from “The Journey of the Magi”, by T.S. Eliot
(who died Jan 4, 1965, age 76, in London)

(The whole poem can be found at http://www.blight.com/~sparkle/poems/magi.html )

What an interesting thought! Birth and Death ….. the same in some fundamental way! (Baptism is about the same thing.)

Whatever else Eliot was trying to communicate, I believe he got the power of the myth right. The Feast of the Epiphany is traditionally the “revelation of the God-Presence to the World”. Implying that what the story of the Birth of Jesus is about is “for all people” (as the angels say in the Gospel called Luke). The essential meaning of both the Incarnation and the Epiphany is this: that when we human beings recognize that we fully come to Life by the Mystery of the non-material “spirit” indwelling us, we both die (to a Life defined simply by “flesh”) and are “birthed”. And it can be both “hard and bitter agony” ….. and ecstatic!

Every birth to some new aspect of Life is a death. Human Life is always about both. A lot of “how it feels” depends on your attitude, your perspective, your choices, your “faith”/path. I suspect this is at the core of every religion.

Epiphany. Manifestation. The Feast invites us to “manifest”, as God does, as our full true Selves in the World.

Brian+