Sermon Archive
Epiphanies
Sermon preached by Ken Boyd at Holy Communion on 12 January 2003
Genesis 1:1-5, Acts 19:1-7, Mark 4:1-11
That They May Face The Rising Sun, by the novelist John McGahern, is the story of a year in the life of a rural community around a small lake in southern Ireland. I read it over Christmas. But the season of Epiphany we have now entered would have been an equally good time, for the ordinary events of ordinary people that the novel relates are full of epiphanies, moments when 'something far more deeply interfused' shines out in the midst of everyday life. I don't want to say too much about the novel's plot, or its wonderful descriptions of nature and the round of rural life. It is the kind of book everyone ought to discover for themselves. But to illustrate what I've just said about its epiphanies, and how thought-provoking these are, let me just mention two episodes McGahern writes about.
The central characters in the novel are a childless couple who have worked in London but returned to their roots in Ireland, and now make their living from a small farm, supplemented by some outside work. At the end of the lambing season the wife, Kate, realises that one of their sheep is missing. After a long and anxious search she finds it, 'high on a bank in a small clearing between briar and whitethorn'. The ewe, 'a late lamb of the year before, not much more than a lamb herself', is 'chewing away in contentment and watchfulness', her 'perfectly formed black lamb by her side'.
The ewe put her face momentarily down to check the lamb's scent and then looked possessively back at Kate. The place the ewe had found on the bank was both a sun trap and a sheltered lawn. They were a picture of happiness.
The story continues. Some days later all the ewes and lambs are brought into the shed by Kate's husband to be dosed for fluke. Afterwards, when they are let out into the field, one of the ewes continues crying long after the others have been reunited with their lambs. Kate's husband then discovers that the small black lamb has been knocked down as the sheep milled about in the shed and trampled underfoot. Although he and Kate know that, for farming people, to mourn the death of one lamb is 'indulgent and wasteful', 'they were not able to ward off a lowering cloud.'
It was as if the black lamb reached back to other feelings of loss and disappointment and gathered them into an ache that was out of all proportion to the small loss.
Later that evening a good friend walks in to their house, another small farmer from across the lake. They tell him what has happened, and he is blunt with them.
'You can quit that,' he said. 'These things happen. Anybody with livestock is going to have deadstock. There's no use dwelling. You have to put all these things behind you. Otherwise you might as well throw it all up now and admit that you're no good.'
Their friend has come with other matters to discuss, and the story moves on. But before it does, the novelist ends the episode with these words.
As [their friend] spoke, the black lamb became an instant of beauty, safe by the side of the young ewe on the bank in the sun, and was gone. The beauty of that instant in the sun could only be kept now in the mind.
An epiphany then, an instant of beauty, a moment of happiness, that 'can only be kept now in the mind'. That is the very nature of epiphanies, sudden realisations of 'something far more deeply interfused' in the midst of the commonplace. In telling the story as McGahern does, without interpreting it further, the novelist is being true not only to literature but to life. Any further interpretation is left to us, the readers.
The same can be said of the other episode from this novel that I'd like to refer to. A member of the community has died and some of his friends are digging his grave in the hard ground of the local graveyard, which surrounds a ruined old abbey. Suddenly one of them, Patrick Ryan, the local jobbing builder, realises that they have marked the grave out wrongly and have widened the wrong end. 'We have put the head where the feet should go', he cries. Does this matter, Kate's husband asks him. 'Does it make a great difference that his head lies in the west?' 'It makes every difference, lad, or it makes no difference', Ryan replies, and when he is again asked why, he says,
'He sleeps with his head in the west - so that when he wakes he may face the rising sun. Looking from face to face and drawing himself to his full height, Patrick Ryan stretched his arm dramatically to the east. 'We look to the resurrection of the dead.'
As Ryan does this, the novelist tells us
The shadow from the abbey now stretched beyond the open grave, but the rose-window in the west pulsed with light, sending out wave after wave of carved shapes of light towards that part of the sky where the sun would rise.
An epiphany? Kate's husband, the novelist tells us, bows his head. But another of the men who with Ryan in their youth had been an amateur actor, applauds his performance; and another again, a harsh, crude and in some respects cowardly man, the least sympathetic character in the novel says 'Begod now - it'd nearly make you start to think'.
Whether it does or should 'make you start to think', however, is left in the air. The novelist again leaves any further interpretation to the reader. The 'wave after wave' of evening sunlight sent out through the rose window 'towards that part of the sky where the sun would rise', of course, echoes the lines of Wordsworth from which I've already quoted:
a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
But only a few weeks ago, on a radio programme which discussed this poem among other topics, a highly intelligent journalist dismissed it out of hand. 'What does it mean?' she said. 'It doesn't mean anything.'
The journalist didn't elaborate on this and wasn't asked to. But in one respect her interpretation of Wordsworth seems not unlike that of the characters in the novel, who interpret what they have seen within the familiar and safe horizon of their own limited experience. They are not prepared to take the risk of 'starting to think' about what might be beyond their own horizons. The horizons of the characters in the novel and of the journalist of course, no doubt are very different. The horizon of the characters is the ancient pagan one, intersected by fading shafts of Catholicism which they cannot entirely believe or entirely disbelieve. The horizon of the journalist is that of the modern no-nonsense world, which holds that what cannot be explained in scientific or commonsense terms, is probably nonsense or superstition. Within both of these horizons, ancient and modern, pagan and secular, the possibility of 'starting to think' what might be beyond them, is repeatedly deflected, by assertion, by irony, by an appeal to commonsense. The epiphany, the 'beauty of that instant in the sun', can 'only be kept now in the mind'. But within the ancient pagan and modern secular horizons, 'the mind' in which the instant is kept, exists only in the brief space between the birth and death of each individual. It exists there only. In 'the light of setting suns, /And the round ocean and the living air, /And the blue sky', there is nothing akin to it, nothing 'far more deeply interfused'.
But is it so? The epiphanies of life, the instants of beauty and moments of meaning in its most commonplace days, have always persuaded some people that it is not enough 'nearly' to 'start to think'. There always have been those who came to believe that in those instants and moments, something or someone beyond the familiar and safe horizon of their own limited experience was calling them, speaking not in audible words, but nevertheless addressing them. When they tried to put this into words, of course, they had only their own limited language in which to express it. So when they tried to explain where it all came from, as we heard in the opening verses of Genesis today, the language they used would later cause difficulties for others - for example when geology came on the scene and the truth of myth had to be sifted from the truth of science. So too, with the language in which Paul, in today's epistle taught those to speak who had 'never even heard that there was a Holy Spirit'. Part of the reason why the characters in McGahern's novel cannot entirely believe in traditional Catholicism, perhaps, is because simply learning the words is not enough. People need also to 'start to think', to wonder at 'the dearest freshness deep down things' where 'the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods'
Epiphanies are there for those with eyes to see, and ears to hear. But as Jesus teaches in this morning's gospel, whether the vision is glimpsed or the word is heard, depends on the ground into which the seed falls. Whether what the poets write 'means anything', whether the novel makes you 'start to think', whether what calls from beyond the familiar and safe horizon of our own limited experience is heard, depends on how ready we are to take the risk of living in the light of our epiphanies rather than of our disappointments.
Of course, even when we do risk living in the light of our epiphanies rather than our disappointments, it can be discouraging to realise how little progress we make. The same old faults and flaws reappear in our personal characters; and as a church, we often have little agreed wisdom to offer the world on the difficult public challenges of the day. Our attempts to live in the light of our epiphanies probably fail more often than they succeed. Yet it is precisely when we realise this, that our epiphanies can be drawn together and sustained - as we 'start to think', not only of them, but of the Epiphany itself, the Word made flesh and dwelling among us, even, and especially, in our failure. For as someone has written:
Christianity is not a system for making people good; it is a system for helping people live with their failure to be good.
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