Epiphany 2018

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

We were eye level with the white cups

Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

East and miles west beyond us, sagging

Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing

Worth knowing.  We thought words travelled the wires

In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light

Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

‘The Railway Children’

Seamus Heaney

Heaney’s humorous, compassionate and mystical seeing of an adult’s memory of a child’s viewpoint is a wonderful entry point into a celebration of what I think of as the Church’s ‘season of seeing’: Epiphany.  

Epiphany: that day, or liturgical season between Christmas and Lent depending on your tradition, which reminds us that the breaking in of God into this world that we have just spent the last six weeks mulling over, is not just a once in an eternity’s event, but a continual cycle of revelation of the fact God remains with us in tangible, visible ways.

Ironically, even though I am nearly six foot tall, I often feel too small to see, either because I am straining to see at an angle from a wheelchair, out of a window or ten steps from a car, or because my spirit feels so shrunk by depression that I feel blinded by ennui.  And even though I have been fortunate enough to have an extensive education, my abiding sense is I’m not yet at the point in my life where I know anything that is really worth knowing.

And yet, though Heaney seems at first to be offering us the possibility of laughing at the children in adult conspiracy, (fancy thinking ‘words travelled the wires … in raindrops’!), it quickly becomes apparent that these ‘shiny pouches’ are miraculous; they are the holders of elemental revelation as water transforms into ‘seed’.

Heaney pushes us further: what is sown?  Light is sown.  

And in the resulting ‘gleam’ what does he invite us to see?

He invites us to see ourselves, as if from the wrong end of a telescope.  For we are indeed small, in stature and in understanding, when faced with the miracle of the waters of Life.

And yet, our smallness is no diminishment; rather, like a child, we are infinitely precious when we become these seeds of seeing; rather, it is as this travelling, seeing seed that we might follow the leading lines and enter the Kingdom, however hard the way, however unprepared and inadequate we feel.

Suddenly after long silence

he has become voluble.

He addresses me from a myriad

directions with the fluency

of water, the articulateness

of green leaves; and in the genes,

too, the components

of my existence. The rock,

so long speechless, is the library

of his poetry. He sings to me

in the chain-saw, writes

with the surgeon's hand

on the skins's parchment messages

of healing. The weather

is his mind's turbine

driving the earth's bulk round

and around on its remedial

journey. I have no need to despair; as at

some second Pentecost

of a Gentile, I listen to the things

round me: weeds, stones, instruments,

the machine itself, all

speaking to me in the vernacular

of the purposes of One who is.

‘Suddenly’

R. S. Thomas

bird on a wire. (iPhone image)