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In this fascinating clip, filmmaker Ken Burns discusses the nature of story and his attraction to historical subjects. For him, good stories are more than they seem on the surface because “the genuine stories are about one and one equaling three.” Such stories dig at the deeper things in reality because “the things that matter most to us-some people call it love, some people call it God, some people call it reason-is that other thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that’s the three.” And it is this greater something we are all looking for in stories, so much so that we tend to “coalesce around stories that seem transcendent.”

What I found most interesting in Burns account was his self-understanding of why he tells stories in general, and historical stories in particular. For him telling historical stories is a kind of “waking of the dead.” So in seeking the very transcendence he describes, Burns points to a kind of resurrective power in stories, particularly in stories about history. His fascination with such stories stems from losing his mother to cancer at a young age: “It may be obvious and close to home whom I’m actually trying to wake up.”

Beyond the haunting and beautiful resurrection imagery inherent in this statement, Burns, by identifying this kernel in his own experience, describes what Stanley Hauerwas calls an “intuition of meaning.” In his memoir *Hannah’s Child,* Hauerwas reflects on the impulse to tell his own story, and for him, memoir comes not from recounting events for the sake of recounting events. Rather memoir comes from events coalescing around a central intuition, an insight into how these events might be thematically related. Quoting Sven Birkerts, Hauerwas says these intuitions result from “the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story.” So for Burns, his mother’s early death provides an intuition of meaning, a place to begin his own story. While for Hauerwas, his mother’s Hannah-like prayer of dedication to the Lord provides his intuition of meaning.

So I’m wondering, as I think about my own future, and even as I attempt to write in a more personal vein, what is my intuition of meaning?

I wrote a paper on John 2 this past semester, and in his feedback my professor noted that the water into wine story is part of the lectionary reading for the feast of Epiphany. He thought this was an interesting connection between the story itself and the idea of epiphanies in literature.

Indeed it is an interesting connection. And I got to thinking about it and reading up on it, and it turns out the epiphany has fallen on hard times. The epiphany in it’s truest form comes from Greek Mythology. Gods and goddesses break into the human realm, and people are overcome with the presence of the divine. In the Bible the epiphany is more properly called a theophany or christophany. Think of the burning bush. Think of Jacob wrestling the angel. Think of the Mount of Transfiguration. Think of the Ascension. The Bible is so thick with epiphany that it is almost commonplace. Indeed, the Bible is an ever increasing cascade of epiphany culminating finally in the eternal epiphany of God dwelling with his people (Rev. 21:3). What is interesting is that n both the Greek and Christian understandings, the epiphany’s center of gravity is the divine. The human’s experience is one of revelation. It is not experience, in other words, that comes from within, but from without.

But epiphanies are very different in literature, and we have James Joyce to thank for that. He was the fist to self-consciously use epiphany as a literary term. For him the epiphany was, a “sudden and momentary showing forth or disclosure of one’s authentic inner self.” It was a way to describe a particular moment of clarity, usually towards the end of a story, that characters have about themselves and their lives. (To see a beautiful example of this read Joyce’s story “The Dead.”) Typically, if and when we say we’ve had an epiphany, we mean it in this way. With Joyce the moment of divine encounter became a moment of personal clarity. The center of gravity shifted from the divine to the self.

So why would a writer like Charles Baxter hate epiphanies and write an essay called “Against Epiphanies?”  I suspect that Baxter senses on some level that the epiphany as Joyce describes it is a sham. If there is the possibility of revelation or the divine, the epiphany seems inevitable. If there is a voice on the other side, we would, it seems, in moments of clarity, distress, comfort, euphoria, in those moments, that is to say, where we come to the edges of human experience, hear that voice or encounter the divine. But in a voiceless world, the epiphany first becomes a “secular manifestation of the sacred,” and eventually, disintegrates because in our world the self is so incoherent that any moment of inner clarity would only reveal a sliver of a fragmented whole. For us truly postmoderns there is no authentic inner self to be revealed.

Without a true sense of the divine and without a coherent self, the literary epiphany becomes, as Baxter says, “phony.” Life, he insists, isn’t like that, since if epiphanies happen at all, they happen rarely. And yet he still longs for them. His self-contradictory impulses reveal an appetite for transcendence, for the divine, for there to be a voice on the other side. But contemporary literature has no space for the divine, no category for the possibility of revelation.

Despite these tensions, you don’t have to look far in contemporary literature to find epiphanies. Take Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom.  This scene towards the end of the novel records the reunion of Patty and Walter Berglund, who had been estranged by adultery and betrayal:

Her eyes weren’t blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in the sum of everything they’d ever said or done, every pain they’d inflicted, every joy they’d shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind.

Here is epiphany in the Joycean sense—a moment of clarity and closure. And perhaps even of forgiveness and reconciliation. But what does it amount to? Two estranged characters reconnect and in their connection see past themselves into what lies beyond them and what lies beyond them is nothing. This is an epiphany, yes, because the characters come to see some truth about the world but it is an epiphany without transcendence.  There is no voice, only void. And if in the end both joy and sorrow weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind, then what use is either?

So where does this all leave us? When I think of epiphanies in any sense it becomes clear to me that I ought to be wary of my own capacity for insight. I ought to be suspicious of my own sense of clarity. I am waiting for the world to act on me, to arrange itself in scrutable ways. Art is a path to such clarity, but as a Christian I sense that this is only true because there is a voice on the other side. To be an artist is to have an appetite for transcendence, and yet, in what seems to me to be the height of irony, many artists reveal that appetite in their longings for epiphany but refuse it’s true nature by denying what an epiphany really means—that the divine seeps into the world, that there are moments when we see behind the curtain and what we see is not the void, but something almost more horrifying (if we are really honest). We see the terror of God’s beauty, a beauty that exposes ugliness and strips pretense. And though we might walk away with our faces shining like Moses, we are first disintegrated like Isaiah.

Unless.

Unless that God comes to us in our form, and spends his days as a human gradually unfolding his glory, a kind of epiphany by degrees. Read the Gospel of John with that in mind—“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”  Each of his signs points to his glory, and for those with eyes to see he is the epiphany of epiphanies, the theophanies of theophanies. He is the first and final word who gives all other insights their meaning. He is our assurance that when the world becomes transparent to us, what we see on the other side is not void but the vast abundance.

Lately I’ve been reading Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, a book length transcript of a 4-day interview with David Foster Wallace. Wallace was considered by many to be the most brilliant writer of his generation. Sadly, in 2008 he succumbed to crippling depression and hung himself.  In light of his suicide, the book bears a poignant sadness, as throughout the interview Wallace talks extensively about the weight of fame and the seduction of hype, and about his own struggles with depression.  In reading Wallace’s account of writing and fame, I thought of Wright’s quote about art and wounds and resurrection.

Wallace knows wounds.  For him the point of books, “was to combat loneliness,” and the best books create a “kind of stomach magic” because they “talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings.”  That tingle, that stomach magic, is exactly what I’m after as a reader, and what I long to do with words.  But more than that, in reading this interview, I realized that as a reader I too often settle for books that are long on diagnosis and short on cure.  A writer like Wallace is a perfect example of this tendency in me.  He sees things more clearly and says things more brilliantly and with more humor than anybody I’ve read in a long time. He gets brokenness.  He gets that the world often doesn’t make sense.  He gets that somehow art is way to rail against all that. But even though he gets wounds, he doesn’t get hope.

I realized too that my problem with Christian art has been just the opposite because most Christian art is dishonest about the wounds of the world.  Often there is a kind of willful ignorance about brokenness. If there are wounds, it seems, then they exist out there, in the undefined regions of the world. The world–John’s poignant word for all that is broken–has become a lazy catchall for all that we chose to ignore and refuse to engage with. Wounds are something out there, not something we harbor and nurses in ourselves.  Christian art often hides its limp and hopes that its outstretched, pointed fingers at the world will draw the eye away from our own hobbles.

Though this is the opposite impulse, it actually ends the same.  In a world without wounds, there is no need for hope and you end up with platitudes scrawled in golden, gaudy fonts on landscape portraits of pastel, gazeboed gardens in neighborhoods where no burglars lurk and no drugs are dealt and no families disintegrate.  Art that only sees wounds can’t see hope, and art that denies the wounds has no need for it.

In all of this I realized, if I want to write, or if I want to make anything that might truly be called art then I must not simply be acquainted with the wounds of the world–I must became a cartographer of my own wounds. I must map their terrain and navigate their crevices to trace their fissures and fault lines. The gangrenous stench of their festering must sting my nostrils.  I must learn the cadence of my own limping.  But I must also hear the voice that echoes off the walls of the empty tomb–He is not here.  He is risen.  It is only in Christ where both the sorrow and the joy of the world perfectly meet.  It is the wounded one who purchases for us a woundless world where all the sad things become untrue.

Mistake 1: Imagination as Escape

Here the imagination is trivialized, cast as mere amusement or distraction meant to provide us with an escape from the humdrum of the everyday.  We might escape by way of our own daydreams or so-called “creative hobbies,” or by way of entertainment produced by creative types, probably in the form of TV or movies, or possibly even in the form of a novel, as long as it’s a page-turner. In this understanding imagination has no expansive qualities or positive social benefit.  It’s simply white noise meant to mask the din of the everyday.  Imagination might in some sense “take us out of ourselves,” but not for the purpose of expansion or improvement, but merely for the feeling of escape.  We emerge from our imaginative experiences, whether by way of consumption or production, like we emerge from a carnival full of spinning lights and clatter.  We stumble home at once light-headed and heavy, left woozy from the spinning rides and lethargic from sugar spikes and crashes. We might be satisfied in some sense, but imagination has made no demands of us.

Mistake 2:  Imagination as Madness

Here the imagination is feared. The fear recognizes imagination’s ability to take us out of ourselves, but dreads where that path might end.  We have seen enough greasy and wild haired geniuses to know that unrestrained imagination is nothing but a path to madness. And so we demand that imagination bend its knee to sovereign reason.  Once muzzled and tamed, imagination might serve reason the king but the Mad Hatter must never wear the crown. Artistic masterpieces serve as backdrop to political and social galas, or worse still as decoration for mouse-pads and coffee mugs.  Songs, some heart wrenching, some subversive, are invoked to sell cars, insurance, clothes, lifestyles, pills, ad nauseam. Fear is overcome by domestication. Imagination is neutered and declawed.

Mistake 3: Imagination as True Freedom

Here the imagination is exalted.  And here again imagination is pitted against reason.  In this understanding reason is something like a staid and unyielding governess, interested simply in rules and order. In a more extreme form, reason is a something like a sadistic nun bent on humiliation.  Only in rebellion against the rule of reason is there freedom. The Dionysian, the Romantic, and the myriad forms of the Bohemian all drink deeply from this wine skin.  And so the carnival becomes not a distraction from life in general, but the center of life itself.  There is no end to the revelry, and imagination becomes an end in itself, so that reason is not domesticated, but dismissed.  Reason is in exile while the Mad Hatter rules the kingdom. And this is the madness those who make the second mistake so fear.

Though each mistake is distinct, in each mistake, a god is made.  Escape becomes a god in the first mistake, reason in the second, and imagination in the third.   They all exalt the wrong thing because all three mistakes fail to consider how imagination and creativity might be used to serve our Creator.  Moreover, in these reflections, another question emerges.  What is the proper relation between imagination and reason?  Is there no reconciliation between the two?  To be sure there are real tensions between imagination and reason.  They are tumultuous brothers.  Like Jacob and Esau they battle for the birthright.  But can peace be negotiated?