On Epiphany

 On Epiphany morning, I turned to my phone when my alarm went off, a habit I have tried to break--but I just had to know what had happened overnight. I clicked on the New York Times logo and scrolled, holding my breath. 

Warnock, the Democrat, had won one of the two runoff elections in Georgia; the other was too close to call. 

I closed my eyes. I fell to sleep again, dreaming I was in a long line waiting to cast my vote in the bitter cold. In that long line, we were all holding candles, all singing the Hymn of the Nativity from my first tradition in my first language, though the line was full of people of all races and genders and sizes and ages. 

I should have lingered on that dream, but instead, I woke panicked, worried that I'd slept in. If I didn't hurry, I might miss my meditation time in front of the tree, or my work out. I knew I'd need them both, especially today. The tree will likely come down tomorrow, I thought, on St. John's Day, the official last day of the season, or the next day, when the season is truly over. I felt a pang of grief: the season, over. It has been years since I have felt this grief quite so acutely. 

I light the Advent candles, the Christmas candle, the row of red candles on the mantel--all of them burned almost to their ends. I flip the switch to the light the tree. 

Sometimes my mother would leave the tree up past my birthday, which comes four days after Epiphany, just because I loved it so much. 

I feel another pang of grief, remembering this was the day she came home for the last time, to die at home. I am there again, as my aunt wheels her through the house, watching her face light up at the sight of the tree. She was the same age I am now then, 49. I can smell her neck when she pulls me toward her, whispers that she wouldn't have missed my birthday for anything. 

I breathe in. She won't be missing Christmas altogether in her last Christmas of this life. She made it for the last day.

On Epiphany morning, I write down the words that have come to me that might become my word for 2021. None of them seem right--but I have some time on my birthday eve to spend in contemplation. I feel another pang to lose the word "Joy," even though I am of course not losing it. I have learned to touch joy even in the midst of the worst grief and pain, even when my family cannot feel it, even when I don't have anyone to share it with, even when times are especially hard. All of my words of the year linger, offering their lessons again and again throughout my life. 

On Epiphany morning, while running on the treadmill, I listen one last time to four short pieces by a women's choir called Lumina that praises the Advent names of God. I listen to the songs I associate with Advent, Noel, Noel and We Three Kings. I am thinking of how many names God has, and then I think of my own many names: mama, yiayia, Argie, Argiro...how many names we all have. 

I am thinking about names when my son comes downstairs much too early and interrupts my work out. He says he wants to sit by the tree, light the candles. Although I blew them out less than a half hour earlier, we do, briefly, and then I send him back to bed and shower so I can get everyone else to school and daycare on time.

On Epiphany morning, after everyone is off to daycare and school, I turn off my phone, hide my news and Facebook links, and focus all my attention on a work project. Otherwise, I know I will be checking the news all morning, waiting for an Ossoff win, a Senate flip. I tell myself that news can wait. 

I work hard, stopping only to get lunch and walk the dogs and pick up the littlest one from daycare, because during nap time he shoved his sock so far down his throat that he gagged. Our daycare provider and friend says she knows he's not sick, but she needs me to come get him. 

He chants "yiayia, yiayia, yiayia" over and over as I drive him home--and my mind wanders back to names: how his last name changed just two days earlier when his mama, my daughter, finally got full legal and physical custody. Just as I am thinking this, he begins to sing--or rather, to make a high pitched noise that sounds like singing. I turn to glance at him and he meets my eyes and laughs hard.  When I get home, I reluctantly pass him to his mama, go back to work.

On Epiphany, I send off my project to the team and then go upstairs to check in with my spouse. She takes one look at me and says, "You haven't seen the news yet, have you?"

"They both won!" I say joyfully. "Is that it? I knew it! We have the Senate."

"There's something else," she says, and then I am watching the storming of our Capitol. Then I am facing Confederate flags and angry shouts and police officers with guns pulled and our representatives cowering under their chairs. I am facing our president telling these people that they are very special, that he loves them.

I don't know what to do. I don't know how to love this country anymore, or if I ever have. I don't know how to feel hopeful about the changes that could happen when Biden and a Democratically-controlled Senate take office on January 20. 

As I have so many times over the last four years, I feel grateful my parents aren't alive to see this, and long for them to be here. I close my eyes, and my mom pulls me toward her again, whispering, "I came home so I wouldn't miss your birthday." (Even then, some part of me knew she had come home to die).

I talk to our teens about what's happened; they ask question after question, scrolling on their own phones. My aunt and sister and I exchange a fast string of texts until we have gone too far, have begun to imagine what would happen if the Capitol burned. Would his followers understand, then, what he has done to us all?  

I close my eyes, remember all the times I have been in that building. The 1993 March on Washington for LGBT rights. The first Iraq war. The many visits for work during the years I was being paid by federal grants. My most recent trip with my spouse, aunt, and oldest daughter. I frantically search for my friends' and relatives' names on Facebook to make sure they've all posted that they are OK.

When I see the terrorists gathered in the place where Ruth Bader Ginsburg's body lay not so long ago, I weep. 

In the meantime, the Magi are getting closer to the place where the child Jesus is. The star is still there all these days, or years, or centuries, later. There has been a long, arduous journey, and night is falling, and they are about to present their most impractical gifts.

In the Greek Orthodox tradition, Jesus is approaching the water, where John the Baptist will submerge him, where the Voice of God will declare to the world who his is. That is the Orthodox Epiphany. And in villages everywhere (though probably not this year), the priest will toss a cross into the sea and all the young men will dive for it. Whoever retrieves it carries it from house to house throughout the village, blessing each space. 

In the U.S. the priest visits and blesses homes on this day, and I suddenly remember our priest singing happy birthday to me on one of these visits. 

Epiphany: the gifts from the Magi, the gift of St. John, the blessing of the house.

We order out for supper, having lost track of time and not made anything. On the car ride to pick up our food I tell my son what has happened, because he heard some threads of information and he is already scared. I tell him what I don't believe: that everything is going to be OK. That everyone has already gone home and nothing else is going to happen. That this was the last attempt by some hateful people to try to tell the world what they believed, but that they showed their true colors, and everyone has now turned away from them.

At supper, I ask who wants to bless the house with me--an Epiphany tradition that my son and spouse and eldest (who no longer lives with us), at least, usually love--but no one is feeling it. Even I am not feeling it. I feel a brief pang of grief, but it passes. I can do that anytime--it doesn't have to be today.

At night, I light everything one more time and sit and sit and wonder: what does it mean that our Capitol was stormed, at the encouragement of our President, in response to his lies, on Epiphany? How can they raise a flag that symbolizes white supremacy on this day, of all days, when the Light is so present, when we are called to see the truth, to feel hope? 

But it wasn't the Magi or St. John who recognized Jesus first as one who would heal and shift the narrative of what Messiah means and tell us to stand with the last and the least. 

It was Elizabeth, then Mary, then Joseph, then the shepherds, then (tragically) King Herod, then the Magi, then us. 

And he didn't die as everyone expected, powerful and old, having created a new kingdom here on earth. Instead, he walked the world, healing the sick, having deep conversations with the powerful and powerless alike, passing on teachings with which the world still grapples, surviving on the generosity of strangers. 

He didn't promise to leave this world in a better place. Instead, he showed us what to do to work toward a just world that is grounded in love.

To really see him in the way Epiphany calls us to do, we have to believe he's watching the Capitol, grieving alongside us. We have to believe he's here among us, reminding us that we know what to do: to follow the star as the Magi did, to gather around that place in the Jordan where Jesus was baptized, to stay present with each new, illuminating moment on our journey--to see it for what it is, to not turn away, to think, "what do I do now, right now, to create a world that is more just and more loving?"  

As I blow out the candles, my eyes fix on my favorite art piece depicting the Magi as tiny figures fixed against a wild, holy, swirling, colorful sky. The whole painting is sky--the Magi are an afterthought. It is more than I can bare to look at it, to imagine them looking up at that beauty, realizing how insignificant they and their journey was in comparison to the Whole Story, the darkness erupting in light, the stardust becoming planets and stars and suns and eventually, living beings we are called to love and to protect.

When they saw their smallness and the Light's great not-smallness, they could have turned around. What did their impractical gifts matter anyway?

But they went on.

Tomorrow, we will take down the Christmas decorations, slowly over the next few days. Tomorrow, Ordinary Time will stretch out like an invitation, but we must remain alert, keep the Star's light in our mind's eye, stay fixed against that Holy Light and know both our insignificance and our great significance.