Epiphany: A Spiritual Uprising

The Winter 2006 issue of “Yes!” magazine [www.yesmagazine.org] bears the title “Spiritual Uprising.”  The feature articles talk about religious communities and spiritual movements in stark contrast to those featured in mainstream media and popular culture.  Although the popular image of religion is one of dependence on fear and repression for its practice, these groups—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, First Nations—speak of the inner heart of reality as being one of compassion, justice and radical inclusion. These people of faith, as Rabbi Michael Lerner suggests, speak of a “New Bottom Line of love, caring, generosity, gratitude, open-heartedness, kindness, based in mutual respect, and celebration of the sacred in other human beings.”  Like the Magi of Matthew’s gospel, these spiritual seekers have found a birth that leads them by another path. 

The birth the Magi found so shook them that they experienced it as a kind of death. They had travelled great distances, expecting a royal birth, and they found instead a helpless baby in a humble household. However, this child they discovered turned their world upside down.  They left suffering the death of all they had known as certain, and from then on journeyed by “roads less traveled.” The spiritual journey they took brought them into conflict with the local religious and secular authorities, and made them unable to live at ease in the “old dispensation.”  This path meant they must love everyone, even when that love could be experienced as subversive, irreligious, or traitorous to their own people and faith. 

To journey with the Magi is a spiritual journey that moves us along this other road, and away from the religion of fear and repression.  The journey is along the path Christian mystics call “spiritual poverty.” This is a spiritual path that strips away all self-images, needs and wants. One comes to an inner poverty and simplicity of being.  The inner spiritual life comes as a gracious acceptance and compassion for one’s self as a being living with and dependent upon others.  The seeming paradox is that this spiritual awakening to human frailty and dependence—the realization that human life is a gift given, and not a contest to be won—gives us spiritual freedom.  We no longer need to earn or prove anything.  To achieve such spiritual maturity is to live without needing to defeat or best anyone else.  It is to live in the integrity of one’s own being, with the graciousness of one who knows the peace of no longer being at war with our shared humanity and our inner being.

The Epiphany the Magi discovered was a birth that without doubt brought inner peace and joy, but it meant journeying from then on without illusions.  The Spiritual Path that is revealed for us in this epiphany is one that moves us into a deeper harmony with both our own inner being and the human community, just as it places us in conflict with all in our world that is false and destructive to human life. This inner spiritual journey leads us naturally to the outer “Spiritual Uprising” that “Yes!” magazine featured.  When we experience this spiritual birth and journey in spiritual poverty, the false gods of wealth, power, fear and greed have no authority over our lives.  When we have known the birth of God in human flesh and blood, it is no longer possible to live in the old dispensation and with the old gods without witnessing to their falsehood.  The Spiritual Uprising of Epiphany brings death and birth: 

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

T. S. Eliot

Further Reading:

Books:

John Cobb and Herman E. Daly, For the Common Good (Beacon Press, 1995).
Jay McDaniel, Gandhi’s Hope: Learning from Other Religions as a Path to Peace (Orbis Books, 2005).
Michael Lerner, Spirit Matters (Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2002)
Thomas Merton, Seeds (Shambhala Press, 2002).
Johannes Metz, Poverty Of Spirit (Paulist, 1968).
Jim Wallis, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. (Harper, SanFrancisco, 2005).

Journals:

Yes!: A Journal of Positive Futures [www.yesmagazine.org]
Tikkum: To heal, repair, and transform the world [www.tikkun.org]


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