A slow Epiphany

When light takes time to reach us

“What if,” she asks cautiously, knowing I don’t default to easy optimism, knowing the griefs and losses and traumas that have brought me to her office, year after year: “What if everything turns out well?”

I laugh and shake my head. She knew I would brush away the possibility, so she says it again.

“What if things turn out okay? Could that be a possibility, too?”

My face cannot bear the full weight of emotion, months of mortality carried like a cross, my body wrung-out from chemo, my mind daunted by surgery.

I put my head in my hands and try to believe in goodness. It gets harder every time.

//

Epiphany dawns and I am tired. Bone tired.

Chemo and surgery dragged me down with exhaustion I have never known: not the frazzled nerves of college all-nighters or new motherhood, far from the sacrificial draining of pregnancy. Now full-body fatigue washes over me like a wave, and I cannot resist its pull. Every day I nap, and each time I wake unrefreshed.

Little wonder the dream in the story is what catches me this time.

//

And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road (Matthew 2:12).

In a dream. Mary and Joseph are not the only ones visited by startling visions or given unexpected messages. Here is another message from the divine, another waking with warning, another direction given in the dark.

I have long loved this feast and its Scripture: the wise ones journeying from distant lands, the celebration of cosmic light, the astonishing gifts symbolic and strange, the prostration of powerful men before a poor child.

If the magi were following a star, they were traveling by moonlight.

If they had traveled from afar, they were willing to endure long nights.

If they worshipped an unknown child, they knew honor and humility.

If they heeded a dream, they were open to spiritual signs.

What a wonder, the holiness of darkness—in stars and dreams, in seeking and finding, in epiphanies that keep coming. Long after the luminary left (if it left at all), the magi were still following God. All the way here and all the way home.

But I never dwelled on their dream before. Now dreams bear the weight of everything.

//

I am healed. Sort of.

My fingers hover over the keys, brooding over the sentence. Is it true? Can I trust it?

Doctors tell me there is no more cancer in my body. But I still stare down more treatments, next surgeries, the ticking countdown of five long years toward remission.

I am cancer-free. I am changed. But could I ever say cured?

Nothing will be the same after what we have seen.

//

In certain Christian traditions, Epiphany lasts for an entire season.

I only learned this as an adult. For Catholics, the stretch between the Baptism of the Lord and Ash Wednesday is known as Ordinary Time. But for some Protestants, this period is called the season of Epiphany and it lasts until Lent.

I’m drawn to their practice of Epiphanytide: whole weeks of lengthening light, more sacred space to celebrate the mystery of God coming to all people. When we cram Epiphany into a single day, we miss the Before and After: the winding road to reach the Christ Child and the unknown paths to return home again.

But perhaps this is what Ordinary Time does, too—inviting us to enfold the sacred into our daily lives, trying to figure out what to do next. After Incarnation changed everything, how do we make our way home? Or make our home here?

//

For six months (or more, time has spiraled in strange ways) I’ve been reading the healing stories from the Gospels. I’d never prayed them all together, never paid them much mind, to be honest. Another leper cured; great. Moving on.

But now these stories of sick bodies and sick minds catch and cling to me. The epiphanies I need most: Emmanuel among us, the messy lot of us, changing us.

The one question I can’t answer is what happened after Jesus left each leper, each blind man, each suffering woman, each sick child, each tormented soul. The Gospel writers rush after the next story, leaving the healed back at home. I want to linger with them, ask them how they lived next, hear how they made sense of what happened.

Silence is the only answer. Silent as a star.

//

Since Advent dawned, since surgeon, pathologist, and oncologist found cancer gone, since the grueling work of healing a broken body consumed days and nights, my prayers and words have turned to quiet questions. How do I live in the After? What can I make of the second chance I’ve been given? What happens after healing?

It is a slow epiphany, the work of wondering what comes next and wandering in the darkness, trusting night can be as holy as brilliant light.

I hear myself tell friends that it will take me a long time to work again, that there will be no going back to how things were before. Friends tell me that it took them years after treatment before they found energy again, that the holy labor of healing will still demand much from me, for a long time.

When you have seen more than you expected, you have to return by another way.

//

A new year settles around us. Soft snow finally falls and stays. In trauma’s looping time, last spring is always a half-inch away in my mind—awful, gaping days of impossible news, icy fear, wind-swept worry, the cavern of my own morality. Every anxious night of staring out the bleak window, pleading to God to give me more time.

It is a slow Epiphany this year. A snow-light winter that takes months to start up. The unseen work of healing, like slow labor over long weeks before a baby is born. This is part of Epiphany, too: finding expectations reversed. Living into the empty afterglow.

Light takes time to find us. Eight minutes and twenty seconds to reach Earth from the sun. Years and years from further stars. Hope and healing take their own time. Longer than we’d like for divine work to be done within body and soul.

But what if everything turns out well? What if, despite all the awful we have known, goodness could still win? What if a single star can shine bright enough in the heavens to lead us home?

I need a whole quiet season to sit with this strange promise, to listen to the holy whisper of hope. We all need more time. The dream still stirs to return by another way.