Epiphanies

January 6 is the Feast of the Epiphany. For Christians, this day when the three Magi are supposed to have visited the newborn Jesus bearing gifts gold, frankincense, and myrrh. That makes Jesus' physical manifestation real. It is sometimes called Three Kings' Day or Little Christmas.

But there are other epiphanies.

Epiphany comes from the ancient Greek epiphanea meaning "manifestation or striking appearance." It is an experience of a sudden and striking realization.

You'll hear the term used to describe a scientific breakthrough or a religious or philosophical discovery.

Epiphanies tend to be rare occurrences. I read that these leaps of discovery or innovation generally occur after "a process of significant thought" about a problem. But there are examples of famous epiphanies, such as Archimedes's discovery of a method to determine the volume of an irregular object and Isaac Newton's realization that a falling apple and the orbiting moon are both pulled by the same force, that seem to come in a moment when someone is not thinking about a problem.

For literary types, January 6 might recall James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” The setting of that story is a party on the Feast of the Epiphany. Joyce gives a secular meaning to an epiphany in the story. I think he mixes the religious and the revelatory aspects of a manifestation. For Joyce, it means the “revelation of the whatness of a thing” or the moment when “the soul of the commonest object […] seems to us radiant.”

In the story, Gabriel has his epiphany through a sad moment with his wife Gretta. He realizes that we cannot separate the past from the present. We can't separate the dead to the living. His wife breaks down thinking about Michael Furey, a former lover who died in the cold and snow. Michael is dead and in Gretta’s past, but she is alive in their present.

Gabriel looks outside “…snow was general all over Ireland…It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried…His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”