epiphany

My cousin got married on Epiphany eight years ago. As one of the honored bridesmaids, high on the promise of new love myself, I remember the magical day in detail.

Catching snippets of the wedding video this morning as I fed her girls breakfast and cleaned up the kitchen (they apparently had been watching the DVD off and on for the last 24 hours), the palpable joy and excitement of that celebration came barreling back. I had trouble controlling the tears, though, because the contrast seemed too huge to comprehend. On the day after their eighth wedding anniversary, this soul-mated couple that all the elated, sweaty dancers paused on camera to congratulate, were headed to a medical clinic for yet another drug to attempt to hold my cousin's husband's ravaging cancer at bay.

I was relieved when Nora decided she wanted to show Liam High School Musical 2 Karaoke and turned the video off. The widening gap between the then and the now had become a gulf almost too big to cross.

Yet, as I drove home tonight, weeping as I waited for freight train to pass, my son totally lacquered from being chased around by three little girls all day, I recalled a scene from the movie Shadowlands. At the end of the film, C.S. Lewis, played by Anthony Hopkins, is up in the attic with the young son of his new wife who has just died of cancer. They are sobbing. And the boy, in the most gut-wrenching chocks and sobs, says to Lewis, "Why does it hurt so much?" And Lewis says so poignantly, "The pain now is part of the happiness then." I, of course, bawled my eyes out, as I am doing now. Because truth hurts.

The truth is, there is no gulf or gap between the then and the now. The pain and the happiness are inseparable. There is not one without the other. When we choose to live and love fully, vulnerably, outside convention or appearance or approval, we open ourselves up to the deepest pain imaginable. Are we crazy? Why ever do we do it?

In that Epiphany wedding video, I saw my answer. We are made for it. We are made to love and be loved. We are made to rejoice. Just as we are made to suffer. And, as much as any of us may try, this side of the veil, we are not made to understand.

On the first Epiphany over 2000 years ago, the wise men (probably astrologers) did the strangest thing. They followed a star, based on a prophesy, and risked life and limb to do it. Historians speculate it took two treacherous years of desert travel to find the King of the Jews, and they weren't even Jewish. They brought gold and frankincense and myrrh, to a baby. And it wasn't for curiosity sake that they made that long trip. They came to worship. They rejoiced. What could they have possibly understood about that journey? They were just doing what they were made to do. They were loving and being loved. Faced with pain and delay, ostracism and danger, doubt and unanswered questions, they followed that star straight to the source.

Then, now, not yet. Pain, happiness. Come what may, it's this Love that keeps us going.

Morning addendum: I have been thinking how incredible that Jesus' most significant visitors were not the religious Jewish leaders down the street. They were the outsiders, some of the least likely on the continent. They traveled from so, so far, with the most astounding faith. They must have looked like idiots. Leaving everything, risking death by defying the most powerful guy in their kingdom, ignoring what their logical brains must have told them. They already had everything. They were rich and smart and respected, and yet they chose a path that would involve suffering because it would lead to love. It was these guys in the story. These guys who found Jesus. This year I understand why.