I’m kind of a word nerd, always checking out meanings and roots in the dictionary. The word epiphany comes from the Greek, “to show forth.” The first two definitions in my favorite American Heritage Dictionary, fourth edition, refer to the feast we celebrate, and the recognition of divinity. What interesting me, however, is 3b: A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization.
One of the most extraordinary mystical experiences in our time took place at an intersection in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. Thomas Merton recounts what he saw March 18, 1958:
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut [now Muhammad Ali Blvd.], in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race … there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all of the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed …
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, New York: Doubleday, 1996
To me, it is no less seminal than the sudden flash of illumination when the wise men from the East recognized the divinity of a tiny child so long ago.
We are all “walking around shining like the sun.” If only we could see ourselves as we really are.
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from Religious Clip Art for the Liturgical Year (A, B, and C).
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