By Bill Harkins
“The people who walked in the darkness have seen a great light.”
Isaiah 9:2
During Epiphany, the season of light, we hear the story of the Magi who, after seeing the Christ child, go home by another way. What does it mean to have taken a journey and looked at the face of God? What became of them when they returned to their homes? How were their lives different and how are our lives different, after we encounter the light of Christ? How might this stir our imaginations here, and now, in our ministries?
Images of light invite wonder. Epiphany occurs just as we observe the winter solstice, that point at which the earth’s axial tilt away from the sun begins to nod back in the direction of light, and warmth. In festivals all over the world people celebrate the return of light, and the harvest it will bring. Neuroscience tells us that the human eye is capable of detecting a single photon—the smallest unit of measurable light.
The evening after our recent winter solstice, my running buddies and I put on our headlamps for a night trail run. As we prepared to bear our lights into the darkness of the woods, I thought about how often in pastoral encounters we enter different kinds of spaces—sometimes spaces of darkness, pain, and ambiguity—and seek to be bearers of light. As we ran on familiar, yet mysterious trails, I found myself filled with anticipation and hope. It may be hope that leads us to seek the light, and bear it into the darkness, with imagination.
Donald Winnicott, the British psychiatrist, believed that the “potential space” between baby and primary caregivers expanded to include the space between child and family, individual and society, and finally the entire world. Within this “transitional” space we may engage in creative living. For Winnicott, the loss of imagination was a diagnostic marker, just as the restoration of the capacity to creatively engage the world indicated a return to wholeness—and to one’s “true self.” Winnicott referred to this potential space as “sacred.” Here one has a capacity to live as creative, “fully alive” human beings. Here, we have a sense of wonder about ourselves and the world.
Pastoral theologians expanded this to include that space between oneself and God. Ann Bedford Ulanov has suggested that the goal of life is to “play before God, as human beings fully alive and showing forth in their playfulness the glory of God.” We can bring to bear upon liturgy, preaching, mission, and pastoral care our imaginative engagement with whatever we find—and co-create, in those “potential spaces.”
T.S. Eliot’s’ poem “The Journey of the Magi” asks some of these same questions about “transitional spaces” and imagination. I find myself connecting with the very human side of their journey. “We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,” Eliot writes, “But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods.”
Like the Magi, we cannot go back home the same way we came. No, nor is home as it was, because we have changed. The light becomes part of us. We, too, search for signs of hope and reconciliation and find that search to have led us to this place and time, amidst the ordinary and mundane. Similarly, W.H. Auden suggests that Epiphany has more to do with the confrontation of the emptiness in late winter than with holiday festivities in December. This seems a cautionary—and deeply honest—reading. Auden’s poem “For the Time Being,” “…evokes the period in which we all live…the flat stretches of our lives which never quite measures up to the Christian ideals or Hollywood portrayals.” Auden writes, “As in previous years we have seen the actual vision and failed to do more than entertain it as an agreeable possibility, once again we have sent Him away, begging though to remain His disobedient servant.”
On the night of our solstice run we were entranced by the mystery of familiar terrain, at an unfamiliar time, and by the simple act of bearing light into the darkness. The trail seemed transformed. In a way, so were we. Orion and the Pleiades whirled and blazed above us in the night sky. The ordinary seemed wonder-full, and the moon illuminated the forest of pine, oak, and beech. The trees seemed luminescent in the cove where we paused alongside a lovely singing stream. We ran in silence, the woods mysterious in the penumbral glow of our headlamps. Our sense of imagination was alive again. Suddenly, on an uphill stretch we saw first one, then two, then twenty other headlamp bearing runners, lighting the darkness—fellow sojourners on the trail, each bringing his or her light into the mystery of that night. This is so often how it goes. We think we are alone, and the new way home will be lonely, only to discover that following a star, in hope, has opened up a whole new world of community. Perhaps the other road home is as close by as our openness to imagination. As Gaston Bachelard said so well, “space seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space.”
It requires pastoral imagination to participate in the good work of redeeming today, with gratitude. In the everydayness of our lives the Word Made Flesh graces us. The self-deception that masks our anxiety and fear—just as it did for Herod—can be transcended by imagination. Finitude is precisely where God seeks us out and finds us, and the Incarnation reminds us that nothing human is alien to God. In the light of imagination we notice the gratitude in the eyes of a homeless woman as we serve her food; or the light in the tears of a loved one who can only mouth the words “thank you,” as you bathe and shave him; or the sadness mixed with hope as one anoints a dying man on a dark winter day. With imagination, we look for and pay attention to the light of Christ in the other, and ourselves. As the poet Mary Oliver said “Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, ‘Stay Awhile.’ The light flows from their branches. And they call out again, ‘It’s simple,’ they say ‘and you, too, have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.’” Epiphany blessings!
Bill Harkins lives in Atlanta, where he teaches pastoral theology at Columbia Seminary, and maintains a private practice in pastoral counseling and marriage and family therapy.. He is a priest associate at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Philip.
Winnicott, D.W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock. Pp. 138-139
Near the end of his life Winnicott began to keep a journal which began with the prayer “O God, May I be alive when I die.” He wrote of himself, “Evidently I must be always fighting to feel creative.” His posthumous volume has as its title Home Is Where We Start From, from the T.S. Eliot poem
East Coker, in which imagination and creativity were symbolized by “…a lifetime burning in every moment.” See also Winnicott, D.W Home Is Where We Start From, ed. Claire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeliene Davis. New York: W.W. Norton, 39-54, esp. 41.
Ibid, pp. 138-139. “The potential space between baby and mother, between child and family, between individual and society or the world depends upon experience which leads to trust. It can be looked upon as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living.”
Ulanov, Ann Bedford. 2001. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. P.135. Ulanov suggests that Winnicott’s work “opens up the sources for religion and the life of the spirit…religion is not a leftover, not something we add on after we gain a psychic life.” Rather, it is the space of what she refers to as “a living metaphysics.” Ulanov builds upon Winnicott’s notion of “primary creativity,” which he believed to mean living the world afresh every day, with a sense of wonder and imagination. Ulanov suggests this has less to do with producing creative products, but rather “perceiving freshly, feeling alive and real, in a self lodged in a body that we know as our own, out of which we live in shared existence with others, but not from compliance, inhibition, or coercion.” P.133. See also especially Ulanov, pp. 5-7.
Eliot, T.S. “The Journey of the Magi.” Collected Poems. 1963. New York: Harcourt Brace
See William F. French, “Auden’s Moral Comedy: A Late Winter Reading,” The Christian Century, 1982.
Auden, W. H. “For The Time Being.” Collected Poems. (1976). New York: Random House
Bachelard, Gaston. 1964. The Poetics of Space. Orion Press. Xxxii, Introduction.
Oliver, Mary. “When I Am Among The Trees,” Thirst. (2006). Boston: Beacon Press