IMAGINE YOURSELF IN a darkened theater. At center stage sits a woman, child on her lap, both wrapped in tonal greys. A tiny stream of light falls from above. Off left, large animals shift their weight on floorboards, chuff-chuffing their breath; foreign tongues murmur them calm. Off right, the only sound is of metal rasps running repeatedly down the length of blades; random sparks flare off the cutting teeth.
This is Epiphany. Everything is waiting to happen.
We know the narrative detail: Mary and Jesus, a manger, the Magi’s star-trekking journey with camels and gifts to honor a “newborn king” (while Herod, like Pharaoh, plots a bloody offense).
But Epiphany is a season for paradigm shifts. What if we scramble the details?
Imagine this. Off left, the chuff-chuffing of foreign tongues come not from men calming beasts, but camels praying as they approach the child, the spiritual waterhole for the world. The camels have not brought kings or astrologers, but a guild of bakers, who extend platters of fresh bread toward the child. At center, the woman wrapped in a cloak of ultraviolet leans back on her stool: She has given birth to a star, filling them both with light. At her side stands a human child. He gazes off right. The sound of rasps and swords, boots and shouted commands fascinate him. Slowly, the child lets go his mother’s hand, relaxes his throat muscles, measures his breath. In a world of bread and circuses, he has made brothers of soldiers. He is a sword-swallower and eats their pain.
THIRD-CENTURY FRESCOES in Roman catacombs hold the earliest depictions of the Adoration of the Magi. In one, three men advance in a line toward a child standing in his mother’s wide-legged stance, showing her authority. Others reveal the Magi extending platters of bread toward the child Jesus. Another illustrates men with camels approaching Mary and Jesus with gifts. The lead gift-bearer extends a disproportionately large right hand to an encircled star overhead. These are the earliest details of the nativity narrative: travelers, bread, camels, a wide-legged woman, a child, a star. Later portrayals add partially visible soldiers.
Epiphany is a time for imaginative leaps. Poet Denise Levertov notes that what we love about the greatest writers is the detail, “relevant, illuminating detail—which marks the total imagination, distinct from intellect, at work.” But details are organized into narratives or paradigms that are containers of meaning. Is it possible to keep the details but transform the paradigm?
Walter Brueggemann reminds us that the world we take as “given” is only a long-established act of imagination “that appeals to be and claims assent as the only legitimate occupant of the field.” Ingenious vaulting from one plane to the next happens when, “through a daring political act,” a new paradigm is articulated, a new understanding revealed.
Same details, new story. The “long-imagined ‘givens’” are challenged and a “counter given” becomes entertainable.
WE SIT IN a darkened theater alongside our unspeakable sorrow—anxiety, brutality, grievous loss, alienations we never thought possible. The child faces us from the edge of the stage, a taste of metal still on his tongue. “Let me give you a gift,” he says, “something made of starlight and old swords.” From his mouth spews a million fireflies.
The people who walked in darkness have become a great light. Epiphany is our mystery.
Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic peace activist and poet, is senior editor of Sojourners magazine. She is author ofBending the Arch: Poems.
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