Epiphany

Is disillusion a possible step towards revelation? Is a disgust for what we have become a prelude to re-discovering everything that we have lost?

Today is the end of the twelve days of Christmas, and the Feast of the Epiphany, in which the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem is remembered, the revelation of God in flesh to the nations.

The word ‘epiphany’ means to uncover, in a moment of great revelation…

Matthew the apostle recounts, ‘The sight of the star filled them with delight, and going into the house they saw the child with his mother Mary, and falling to their knees they did him homage.’

‘The nations come to your light and kings to your dawning brightness,’ prophesied Isaiah.

‘He shall rule from sea to sea, from the Great River to earth’s bounds,’ the psalmist foretold.

‘This mystery that has now been revealed through the Spirit to his holy apostles and prophets was unknown to any men in past generations; it means that pagans now share the same inheritance,’ expounded Paul the apostle.

One must also remember the aftermath of Epiphany, the slaughtering of the Holy Innocents, the male infants of Bethlehem, and the flight to Egypt of the Holy Family.

On this day, I always think of one of the great poems of the modern age, TS Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’, in which he imagines the subjective experience of the Magi, as they travelled for years from the East.

The opening lines:

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’

But he is writing about more than the Magi; he is writing of his own conversion, his own epiphany.

The American poet of the modernist hellscape, ‘The Waste Land’ had declared himself a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in faith.

His contemporaries were horrified: Virginia Woolf announced that Eliot was now dead to her.

Eliot anticipated this reaction in the poem.

The concluding verse:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had 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.

Eliot had imagined also the return of the Magi to their own land. After encountering Light, what would they make of their own religious regimes? The church would not reach them in their lifetime, after all. How were they to live?

They were to live no longer at ease, amongst an alien people.

These words were written not only for the Magi, but for Eliot too, making his way through his own ‘lost generation’, in post-Christian England and Europe.

And yet…

Something is brewing.

I noted with interest this comment on X, by its owner, the world’s wealthiest man, a man who has gone off the regime’s ‘reservation’ to some extent:

Oswald Spengler predicted that at the end of western civilization, a second religiousness would emerge (along with a Caesar to dismantle the money power behind illusory democracy).

While Spengler was something of a relativist and viewed this phenomenon as a kind of deterministic, sociological phenomenon, does not God meet us by grace in the natural order?

Are other epiphanies preparing us for a grander one, epiphanies concerning the true nature of the powers of this world?

Today is also January 6th, the anniversary of Trump’s faux ‘insurrection’. Biden’s speech to ‘commemorate’ the attack on ‘sacred democracy’ celebrated the aggressive prosecution of the protestors, who were unarmed and killed nobody:

“Since that day, more than 1,200 people have been charged for their assault on the Capitol, and nearly 900 of them have been convicted or pled guilty. Collectively to date, they have been sentenced to more than 840 years in prison.” His chosen audience applauded.

Yet most Americans believe cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 elections, and most believe the same will happen in 2024.

Nearly 50% believe the January 6th riots were provoked by the undercover government agents.

Around the world, regime narratives on mass immigration, climate change, gender radicalism, race relations, covid, vaccinations, the story of World War II, 9/11, Ukraine, are all being questioned, being seen through by important minorities.

The generation above mine, who would previously have assumed some level of good faith in accepted scientific and historical narratives propounded by media and politicians, are increasingly ‘red-pilled’.

I hear something of this in a small way in the response to my own humble contribution to this new questioning, from a South African perspective, in the shape of my book, Rage and Love.

Is disillusion a possible step towards revelation? Is a disgust for what we have become a prelude to re-discovering everything that we have lost?

Today is the Feast of Epiphany…