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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?

When we piece together the puzzle of humanity, where does imagination fit?  Is it something like an anonymous piece of sky or ocean, that is turned and turned in our hands, only to be slammed into place somewhere in background, or, worse still, abandoned in the box?  Or if the Fall is something like a shipwreck, is imagination simply left adrift, while everything else we call human is gathered in the rafts?

Though we have had our share of imaginative geniuses, of poets and composers, of novelists, sculptors, and painters, as well as  creative entrepreneurs, explorers, politicians, and policy makers, the Church, it seems, has not really answered the question of the imagination.  In the unfolding drama of the church age, it seems the imagination has most often been cast as the villain or the fool, as Shylock or Falstaff. In which case, the imagination is something either to be repressed, restrained, even incarcerated, or perhaps  endured, tolerated, or perhaps occasionally  enjoyed. It seems we almost never ask what the shape of a Spirit-fueled imagination might be.

By contrast, we think we know what redeemed reason looks like, and for many it is reason alone that has remained untainted by the Fall.  But when you take Creation seriously, that it is good, and Ah, very good, then you must take the Fall just as seriously.  Nothing that makes up a person, not reason, not the will, not the mind, not the heart, not the imagination, emerged unscathed from the Fall.  The Fall is merciless–its stain is pervasive.

And I have known its stain.  When I think about how I daily use my imagination, I am ashamed.  When fueled by pride my imagination weaves tales of power and conquest.  By way of daydreams,  I come to inhabit something like a fairy-tale world of infinite wealth and affirmation, where I am the victor, the  hero, the king, and the conqueror.  When fueled by fear my imagination betrays me. I become an exile in a wasteland where health slips away, friends disappear, family dies, and love withers.  Peopled with swindlers and killers, cheats and liars, the fear-fueled imagination becomes a sort of prison in my own mind.  This not to mention the lust fueled imagination turning its tricks in my heart.

But even more I have known redemption.  Knowing the darkness of my own imagination on one hand, and my desire to serve the Church with a sanctified imagination on the other, over the next few posts I want to wrestle with the question of the Christian imagination.  What would does a Spirit-fueled imagination look like? What sorts of things does it produce?  Or to use Wolter’s language, what was the original “creational goodness” of the imagination?  What was its structure?  And how might it be regained and outpaced in redemption?

We deal with the consequences of forgetfulness every day. When we forget to set our alarms, we might end up being late for work.  When we forget where we put our keys, we might have to tear apart our homes to find them.  When we forget people’s names, we might stumble our way through a social encounter to avoid embarrassment. Taken together these examples are more frustrating than dire, but what of forgotten birthdays and anniversaries, what of forgotten lessons learned, what of forgotten times and places? In forgetting these things we might lose the trust of others, but even more so we might even lose ourselves.  From the minute to the grand, much of life hinges on our ability to remember. Our life in Christ is no different.

Psalm 95 is a meditation on spiritual forgetfulness and its consequences.  Throughout the Psalm the Psalmist continually implores us to remember the works and ways of the Lord, and by way of example he sketches the consequences of forgetfulness from the story of Israel.  At Meribah the people of Israel stood on the other side of redemption.  They had been brought out of Egypt by the mighty hand of the Lord and had been delivered from bondage.  But when they lacked water, instead of listening to the voice of the Lord and trusting his ways, they listened instead to their own thirst.  And in this they forgot the Lord, and in their forgetting they hardened their hearts.

Today, the psalmist says, today, the Lord is speaking, and unlike the people of Israel before us, we must not forget the Lord because a forgetting heart is a hard heart. By way of exhortation the Psalmist reminds us of the works and ways of the Lord both in creation and in redemption. We must first remember that the Lord is our maker, that “in his hand are the depths of the earth,” and that “the sea is his, for he made it.”  And we must also remember that in redemption he has made us “the people of his pasture” (v. 7). But our remembering must never be a cold rehearsal of facts.  For the church, worship must be our means of memory.   By way of worship we  rehearse the drama of creation and redemption, and in so doing we remember the Lord as creator and as savior.  Worhsip is how we remind our forgetting hearts of his works and ways.

This is why we must sing.  This is why we must hear the word proclaimed.  This is why we must partake of the sacraments.  Without these appointed means, without worship, we will forget, and we will grow hard.  In this way the liturgy of the church is the antidote to our own lethargy.  And when we do forget we must rehearse his goodness all the more by remembering the Lord’s mercy in our forgetting.  Even at Meribah he showed his mercy.  Though the people forgot, the Lord did not, and in his kindness he made the bitter water sweet.  In the work of Christ, the Lord has made all our bitter waters sweet.  Today it is his voice we hear.  And today it is his name we praise.  So may we be a remembering people.

“And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel, saying, If anyone sins unintentionally in any of the Lord’s commandments about things not to be done…” (Lev. 4:1-3).

We are so enamored with the freedom of our wills that the idea of unintentional sin seems contradictory.  We think sin by definition must be intentional because we are prone to define sin, if we define it all, in terms of action.  But this passage makes it clear that a large swath of sins originate in our nature, rather than in our conscious volition.  If my foot were rotated ninety degrees, then by nature I would have to distort my body just to attempt to walk straight.  In this case, it is my nature that dictates my path, even if my will deeply desires another way.  And so it is with unintentional sin.  To take a musical example, if the neck of a guitar is twisted enough, it doesn’t matter how carefully you finger the chords or pluck the notes.  Inevitably, many, if not most of the notes will sound off.  Unintentional sin is like that.  We try to make music and end up making noise. And often in both ignorance and delusion, we attempt to tune ourselves to the pitch of our expectations.  And when we do, we continue to make noise, and call it music.  But the law is the true measure, the standard pitch of God’s holiness sounding forth, and when we are measured against that pitch, we all rattle with dissonance.

But the Lord in his grace knew this and made provision in his law for unintentional error. He, more than anyone, understands the bent of the human heart,   We are twisted, such that even when we act out of our best motives, we often fall short. The same was true for the people of Israel, from the anointed priest (4:3), to the congregation (4:13), to the leaders (4:22), to the common people (4:27).  Everyone is bent toward unintentional sin.  Not even the appointed priest, the spiritual professional whose job it was to understand and apply the law, could avoid transgressing the law by mistake. And so the Lord provided covering for these kinds of mistakes.  And he still does.  To take up the metaphor of the guitar, in the Old Covenant, God was content to bend the notes into place to sound pleasing notes.  But in the New Covenant his grace goes further still.  With the provision of his Son as the full and final sacrifice, God untwists what sin has distorted, so that by the power of Spirit, not only are we retuned, but we are able to sing forth in beautiful song.  It is in Christ that we are being retuned to the pitch of his perfection, so we might play in harmony with him to the glory of the Father.

“Worshipers confront God as an overwhelming and yet appealing mystery, and then recognize themselves as creaturely.”  Dictionary of Biblical Theology

A peasant may not know he is a peasant until he stands in the presence of a king.  In the same way, a man may fancy himself a god until he stands in the presence of the Almighty. To experience the holy is first and foremost a confrontation between the visions we cherish of ourselves and the infinite actuality of God.  To see that God is God is to see, among other things, that we are not.   And when we have this realization we have to worship.

That is why Leviticus as a book about the holiness of God is by necessity also a book about worship. Creatures worship the Creator in part to remind ourselves that we are in fact creatures.  And when we worship the very elements of our worship serve again to remind us of our creaturely state. Indeed, for Israel, “the material of the offerings are the Israelite’s ordinary foodstuffs” (DOBT).  They offered wheat, barely, oil, sheep, bulls—the very ordinary elements of their lives. As creatures ourselves all we can offer up to God is the stuff of creation.  Without this realization, we might start to believe that what we offer up to God somehow impresses him, or worse still somehow obligates him.  Herein lies the fundamental difference between pagan worship and the worship of God’s people.  Yahweh cannot be conjured or bartered with.  Worship is not an incantation by which we summon God to do our bidding.  If Yahweh heeds us at all it is because of the surpassing splendor of his grace, not the supposed splendor of our worship.

It is easy to miss this because we might wonder why God require these ordinary things.  Why does he ask for  bulls and grain?  It is not because he is hungry.  After all, we can bring God nothing that he does not already possess.  God does not require worship in the sense that we are offering up to him something that he lacks.  God requires worship only in the sense that we as his creation are obligated to him for life and breath and all we possess.  In this way our worship is not primarily a reminder to him of our devotion, but a reminder to ourselves of our great need.  Take Israel as an example.  They weren’t offering food to God because he needed to be fed, but because they did.  To willingly offer up what sustains us is to cry out for a different kind of sustenance.  Truly, man does not live by bread alone.  We only truly remember this when we worship God.