Emily: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?”
Stage Manager: “No. The poets and saints maybe...they do some”.
Our Town, Act III, Thornton Wilder

I acted in Our Town in 9th grade, and I’m guessing most of y’all had to read it in high school. My kids did. It’s a great play and the lines above really stuck with me as a teenager with a budding faith. “The poets and saints” became my heroes. The play was written in 1938 but Emily’s question had an edge to it that resonated with a kid that didn’t quite fit in in high school in suburban Charlotte. How do we realize life? At this point in the play, Emily is looking back on her life (she died in childbirth) and realizes the deeper, most important things in life are nestled in the everyday.

Sometimes, the Real breaks in and a lightbulb goes off. Something “clicks,” our eyes are opened, and we real-ize something for what it is, we are “en-light-ened.” Another word for those experiences is “epiphany,” and I have found that the “poets and saints” describe them best. For me these “epiphanies” are almost always spiritual. This Sunday and the next several (called the season of Epiphany) are all about how God revealed God’s Self in Christ—epiphanies!—through the visit of the Wise Men, Jesus’ baptism, his miracles… Jesus’ ministry was meant to show us how to “realize life” and live within that realization. He invites us to have our eyes opened to the “a-ha’s!” that happen around us. God breaks in in the everyday, and it is a pure gift.

Peace,
Pr. Christian