EPIPHANIES … Timely Definitions for January 6th & Beyond

Commemorating the sacred, the profane, and the birthday of Kahlil Gibran, accompanied by a couple of poems & a song.

Greetings!   As some of you know, the New Year doesn’t officially start for me until the first Sunday of January when I open my usually quiet home to a wonderful parade of family, friends & neighbors, old, new & in between, who join me in celebrating Russian Christmas. It’s a high-spirited gathering accompanied by hearty bowls of Ukrainian Borshch, Meatballs Stroganoff, Vareneky (aka Pierogi), Kielbasa, and Pink Pickled Eggs, all of which make good company even better.  I’ve told its backstory in Arms Filled With Bittersweet, and you can read it here if you’re interested.

Russian Christmas, or Epiphany, as you’ll see in the next paragraph, actually happens on January 6^th, which sadly has taken on a very different significance for many of us since 2021.  My celebration is always the Sunday closest.

So here are two definitions of Epiphany:  (1) A Christian festival, observed on January 6, commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the gentiles in the person of the Magi; twelfth day of Christmas according to the Gregorian calendar, “Russian Orthodox Celebration of Christmas” according to the old Julian calendar.

Epiphany: (2) a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something  … any moment of great or sudden revelation.  (as in recognizing the insurrection of January 6, 2021)

And Birthday: the anniversary of a birth, as in the “birthday of Kahlil Gibran”,  the poet whose words left their mark on millions of readers. Here are two quotes I’m particularly fond of. (1) Jesus was not sent here to teach the people to build magnificent churches and temples amidst the cold wretched huts and dismal hovels. He came to make the human heart a temple, and the soul an altar, and the mind a priest. And (2) Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

We have made our way to 2024 … a new year. Where to begin?  Why not with the babies and the children – in Ukraine & Africa & Palestine & Israel & on the streets of America? How about that famous Little Town of Bethlehem with its iconic manger and The Star? Have we forgotten that Palestine is also a Christian country and Bethlehem, the birthplace of that famous baby Jesus, is a real town?

This year, as Bethlehem canceled its Christmas festivities in order to mourn the more than 9,000 Palestinian children slaughtered during these past three months in the name of “self defense”, the Reverend Munther Issac, a Palestinian theologian and pastor of Bethlehem’s Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, delivered a message to the world titled “Christ in the Rubble: a Liturgy of Lament”.  Will you take 20 minutes out of your busy day to watch it and the follow up interview with Rev Issac by Amy Goodman?

OR if you can only spare a few minutes and would rather read a poem …  try this one from the January 1^st issue of the online poetry journal, Rattle.

THE NEW YEAR MAKES A REQUEST
By Abby E. Murray

It wants us to stop wishing for peace
like it’s the one guarding some goldmine
of surrender or compassion, like the act

of not killing each other really is
as easy as pouring tea into mugs,
like it’s something we could have had

years ago if we needed it enough
to get up and make it ourselves.
The new year is broke. The new year

wants us to put dinner on the table
for once, wants to arrive in January
without pouring a drink for anybody,

wants us to rub its swollen feet,
and while we’re at it, stop drawing i
as a baby, too. Can’t we tell how old it is,

how it’s been growing for ages
the way we give it no choice but to do,
its face withered as the leather of believing

that wishes are akin to changing?
The new year is tossing our demands
out the window like laundry, and here we are,

catching them like the birds they are not,
just a bunch of prayers as useful
as limp underpants and socks:

who will destroy the guns? the dictators?
the injustice? we shriek. Who will bring us
what we’re waiting for? and the new year

points to so much peace within reach of us
in the shape of rubble or sweat
or estrangement or disapproval or debt,

needing to be gathered, sorted, and kept.
Get it yourselves, the new year says,
and its voice is as clear as a mother’s.

To quote Leonard Cohen: I can’t run no more with that lawless crowd where the killers in high places say their prayers out loud ….  And Vice President Kamala Harris: Democracy is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it.  Let us not throw up our hands when it’s time to roll up our sleeves.   

Oh Yes … I did say a couple of poems, didn’t  I ?  Here’s one I wrote after reading “I Knew Better Than to Say” by Beth Williams.

January 2021 
     For Beth Williams with gratitude
     for her poem, “I Knew Better Than To Say”

When friends asked what she was writing about it,
as if she were the one charged with explaining
how a match turns to fire … as if she were the only
one who knew how to research insurrection, she,
being a poet, and knowing how to answer in words
that do not require speaking the unspeakable, said
she would rather write about the bird flying south
dangling dinner from its mouth like a little flag.

She likened herself to a lone egret, standing hungry
and one-legged on a pier looking into the river for food
on a day when nothing swims by.

Don’t ask me again, she said loud and clear,
to write that this is not who we are. It is. And then,
bless her breaking heart, the poet goes on to say …
We are the species unable to fly, the un-winged walkers 
who every single day will find a way to pluck the idea of hope 
from the sky.  

The way I see it then, it is up to us, the gentle, angry, loving people of this world who still believe in the possibility of Peace, to find a way (each of us in our own way) to pluck the idea of hope from the sky, tuck it in our pocket, touch it often …  and Sing For Our Lives.

All Blessings on Us All … Nosdrovyea / Shalom / Salaam

Until Next Time,
Sulima