Epiphany

Epiphany was Dirk Rinehart's favorite season in the Christian calendar. And it does seem a lovely, gentle time--those days following Christmas and New Year's.

We have just ended the Epiphany octave, but there are so many memories and customs attached to it. The usual memory, of course, or the inherited memory, is of the Magi, traveling to Bethlehem, following the Star. "Star of wonder, star of light..." How many years in which three male members of the church choir, or two members and the priest, would sing "We Three Kings of Orient Are," playing the parts of Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar.

"A cold coming we had of it" begins T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi," but those five opening lines are not Eliot's--he took them from a 1622 sermon by Lancelot Andrewes. And there is a later, often funny, "Journey of the Magi," by Paul William Roberts in which the Toronto journalist and a profane taxi driver follow the astrologers' route from Tehran to Bethlehem.

This is also the time of Janus, the two-headed god who sees both forward and backward, at the hinge of time.

Good reading at this time: "The Four Wise Men," by the mystical Michel Tournier, and--most appropriate--"Twelfth Night," one of Shakespeare's most charming romantic comedies, written to conclude the Court's Yuletide celebrations 420 years ago.

James Joyce wrote often of epiphanies, as they may appear in daily life. In Joyce's world, the word, though it is derived from the Greek verb "to reveal," seems more to mean an enlightenment, an awareness, an understanding--perhaps a gentle revelation.

May we experience many epiphanies this year.