Epiphany means many things, as I discover it means Easter and resurrection...

Epiphany Brings News
By Peter Menkin


The Winter is young,
Trees bare against a grey sky.
Rain here.

Epiphany brings news
To me of the resurrection’s
Gifts.

Through this gift,
New creation,
In the cross—resurrection.

This Rowan Williams
Tells us these things;
Wait on the Christ—open heart.

This theologian I am reading
Says,
Shed enmity towards failures,


Enmity between people,
Shed this.
Then comes friendship with God.

Not matters of the mind,
Of the head,
But of the heart.

I think of Easter,
“the living of the believing life.”

Our trust is in Easter.















This poem was just written, and is the result of my coming towards the end of Rowan William's book, "On Christian Theology." I visited a monastery today, and it is also part of my thinking about ways of the heart, that were explained during the talk by one of the monks; it isn't the head that does these things of contemplation that we practice. It is the heart we engage with others, in love, and that love that is Christ who offers us in the Trinity the gifts of an interior life with God. Big stuff. I thought my epiphany, as expressed in the poem important. I suspect it isn't a stranger or strange expression about the Easter experience--our yearning towards Easter in Winter and perhaps during other seasons as well.

Rowan Williams writes about our living with "failure" and other matters common to us all, and he writes about the selfhood each of us has. In fact, he says a great deal about the interior life, about which I did not understand half. This quote about a kind of liberty in the knowledge of and experience of Christ and the cross is a good one. "...the assumption that there is essence whose liberty is infringed by the insulting limits of time and language and other realities, by death and the body and all that is not consciously chosen by this immaterial ego." He talks about the gift, that it is. He talks about living a shared future with others. I hope I have done him some justice here.