epiphany 2017: claim the light

Help me to journey beyond the familiar 

and into the unknown.

Give me the faith to leave the old ways 

and break fresh ground with you.

Christ of the mysteries, I trust You

to be stronger than each storm within me.

I will trust in the darkness and know

that my times, even now, are in Your hand.

Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,

and somehow, make my obedience count for You.

Prayer of St Brendan 

In the course of preparing this winter’s Advent series on focus I stumbled over this aphorism attributed to St Brendan: "You are the veil that hides the paradise you seek.”

Epiphany is a revelation word.  A trumpet word of clarity and certainty.  A word that makes me want to celebrate out of sheer gratitude that God is in the world and can, despite my dull eyes, be seen.

But I so often get in my own way.  Clarity and certainty disappear, overshadowed by my inability to surrender my will, my power, my control; my inability to let go of the emotions and attachments that propel me in directions God is not calling me to go.

The storms within me often seem to cloud eyes that long for fresh sight of God within and without.

And yet, even in my blindness, and perhaps most especially at this mid-winter point, I trust that God is the God of that crucial, miraculous, ‘somehow’ of the last line in St Brendan’s prayer above.  

I reach for that Light in the midst of my shadow.  

I will trust in the darkness and still I will know.  

I will, one day, break through onto fresh ground that bathes in a new brilliance.

So this Epiphany I return to the Psalm that kept me company in Advent, returning to the words of the Psalmist who sings of holding onto those thinnest threads of my winter faith, because I am assured of the promise of a vision of the God who is ‘Light, space, zest’:

I’m sure now I’ll see God’s goodness
    in the exuberant earth.
Stay with God!
    Take heart. Don’t quit.
I’ll say it again:
    Stay with God.

(Psalm 27.14 (The Message))

The invitation of Epiphany?  Wait and See.

Some seeds beneath the earth

are dormant.

They fell the last time cool air

turned the leaves

gold.

Those seeds have different needs than we do;

let them go about their life

completely unharmed 

by your views.

We have cracked open, we sensed

even beneath the earth - 

the holy was near,

and are reaching up to know

and claim

light

as our

self.

'They have different needs'

St John of the Cross/ Daniel Ladinsky

sensing the holy. iPhone image.