Epiphanies can come in the most ordinary moments

By Dr. Heather Bozant Witcher, Young Adults

The start of each semester brings its own challenges but also its own joys. One of the things I love most about teaching in a university setting is that each semester, we’re given the opportunity to engage and motivate an entirely different set of students.

What worked last semester may no longer work for this group, providing me with a unique environment that focuses my attention on always learning and relearning how to relate to varying groups of students.

This semester in my British survey, I’ve brought James Joyce back into the reading schedule. I often vacillate between Joyce and Woolf, both notoriously difficult Modernist prose writers, but I feel like I’m up for the challenge this semester. One of the greatest aspects of Joyce’s work is his use of epiphany.

As Catholics, we know what that means. We just celebrated the feast of the Epiphany: the revelation of Jesus as the Son of God. This revelation occurs in three ways: the visit of the Magi, Jesus’ baptism and the Wedding at Cana. In each of these instances, we celebrate an awe-inspiring revelation within the most ordinary of circumstances – a visit to a newborn, a baptism and a wedding feast.

It’s that sense of epiphany that Joyce, too, inspires in his work. A sudden flash of spiritual or personal recognition that vanishes in an instant, provoking intuitive insight into the essential meaning of something. These key moments often occur within the midst of the ordinary or commonplace aspects of everyday life.

It isn’t every day that we experience epiphanic moments, much less religious insights, as we go about our daily routines. Often, I’ve wondered about those moments: do we always recognize them when they do strike? Do we experience our own epiphanies – religious or secular – more frequently than we think, but simply don’t register them as epiphanies?

Most recently, I was struck by this thought while feeding one of my sons. The other was on his activity mat, batting at dangling objects, when suddenly he rolled over. It happened so quickly. I wasn’t quite prepared, despite my pediatrician telling me it would happen at any moment. As I sat there, one son in my arms and the other on the floor, looking quite pleased with himself, I thought of Joyce. In that transient moment, I realized just how quickly childhood passes.

It’s a conundrum – like most epiphanies – how we can be so excited and desire for the next stage of development to come, and yet feel such great sadness as each milestone is reached. For with each milestone, we move further and further away from infancy and dependency. We move closer and closer toward autonomy and a growing sense of our place in the world.

While not as earth-shattering as the revelation of God, it’s in these everyday epiphanic moments that, I think, we come closest to understanding the impact of the mysteries of our faith. The earth-shattering revelation of God taking the form of a tiny, innocent babe; the miraculous awe of a virgin becoming a mother. So, it’s these moments, perhaps, that we can hold onto not only for their impact on our own personal lives but also as insights into the divine.

Dr. Heather Bozant Witcher can be reached at hbozantwitcher@clarionherald.org.