Epiphany And The Seeing Eye

These days on an island in the northern hemisphere are grey, cold, dark and gale-lashed. People can be like that, too. In stark contrast the Christian Church celebrates Epiphany - a stream of Uncreated Light lighting up every corner of the world - if we have eyes to see. Aye, there's the rub.

At the request of a publisher I am preparing a book of forty days reflections from Advent to Epiphany to be published later this year. These forty days begin by preparing the way for a fresh Coming. They conclude by developing what the Celts call 'the seeing eye'. We increase our awareness, our spiritual antennae, until we see glimpses of glory.

The Welsh poet priest R.S. Thomas wrote about this in his poem The Bright Field:

I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the

pearl of great price, the one field that had treasure in it. I realise now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past. It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Four of us took a trip to see 'The Force Awakens' I wonder how many blog readers recognised the very last scene where the heroine, Rye, tracks down Luke Skywalker, who has been in hiding from the evil First Order throughout the film. Their meeting in that liminal place on the edge of galaxies seems to be the prelude to the fight back of the forces of good in the next film. The place is Skellig Michael, the rocky outcrop off Ireland's coast lashed by the Atlantic ocean, where the beehive huts of monks who survived and prayed there for five hundred years filled our screens. Here, surely, is a subliminal message.