Epiphany

Today was Epiphany … and today I felt like I had an Epiphany, and it seemed to reach so far into my soul that now I really understand why some people hate it that that word is over-used. This experience blows your mind. This experience makes you re-visit and re-think everything. Nothing is the same. Or … well … it’s too early to tell, really, it’s still the same day. And of course things are “the same” … but still it seems like there’s a new light on everything, like a filter has been removed and I’m seeing things for the first time.

It all started out relatively ordinary: Sunday morning, getting started later than I wanted to. Sitting in choir, rehearsing today’s anthems: “How brightly shines the morning star” in 15 different arrangements. And Poulenc’s “Videntes Stellam” – another glorious Poulenc motet, more difficult than the one we did Christmas Eve, which was difficult enough! Into the service, that familiar feeling of sharing this experience with another singer, one who is not even here. Things started whizzing around in my head. Sharing … the piece I wrote about sharing … It’s something about boundaries, but not boundaries in what I understand to be the usual sense. Not the idea that there’s a self inside me and other people outside me and they should be kept apart, but that there’s a traversing of the boundaries somehow. That I internalize what’s outside me and thus really “get” it. It becomes mine. And that’s a desired thing, not a sickness as I’ve sometimes feared.

Fusion … confusion. What’s inside and what’s outside? When is a relationship concrete, real … when is it something between two separate entities, and when is the other entity not a separate being at all but a part of myself? I realize that I keep getting into relationships where the other person becomes a sort of confidant, someone I tell everything to … or more likely write everything to, and my life seems to begin to glow with meaning. It’s like it doesn’t mean anything if I don’t share it. It’s like it’s not about living the life, but about telling about living the life. It’s like the tree doesn’t make a noise if there’s no one there to hear it. And then, so often, they drift away, my confidants. They stop responding. It dawns slowly on me … a hollow feeling. It’s not like I’ve lost another person … it’s like I’ve lost a part of myself. And I don’t know what’s happened, I don’t know if they’re there or not. I don’t know if they were ever really there, or if all the intensity was really me finding my own self but it didn’t seem real unless it was reflected back somehow. Is that narcissistic? It sounds like it, but somehow that’s not what it feels like.

Intensity in relationship, feeling like you are not two separate beings but one being. I remember feeling that way near the end with Paul: walking him from the bathroom to his bed at one of the crisis times; he wasn’t leaning on me, he was plastered to me. Like the feeling in Joni Mitchell’s “A case of you” – you can listen to it at http://www.kcskrobela.com/realaudio/caseofyou.ram if you want to, or read the lyrics at http://www.jonimitchell.com/BSNLyrics/CaseOfYou.html. “You are in my blood like holy wine.”

Like a sacrament. Is that sacrilegious? And suddenly I had a different sense of communion, the bread and wine, the sacrament, the body and blood, traversing boundaries, getting someone inside you. (Look out for Kitty, Paul said laughingly in his time, if she ever gets involved in the church!) Bright bubbles seemed to burst in my head.

Then Jeanne went up to the pulpit and started her sermon. How well do you think you know Jesus, she asked. Does the question make you squirm? Well guess what, that’s a good thing! This is Epiphany, the time for looking at it all as if you’ve never seen it before. The time to re-visit and re-think everything. Now it was like she was speaking from inside my head, only being able to explain what the thinking was. At that point I more or less lost it.

And Ann, beside me, first held my hand, then handed me another Kleenex when I had gone through the one I’d brought with me. Good friends, life is beautiful.

Eventually I got home, washed some dishes, welcomed the furnace guy, went through yesterday’s mail, put away the groceries. Ordinary miracles. Finally to the computer, to find EMail from John Wright, the singer of “the Belgian CD” responding to my apologies for being so slow getting to setting up his website. Are you reading my mind? He asks. He is thinking that it’s time to “JUMP OUT THERE and DOOOO THIS!!!!” and one part of that is getting the website going. He tells me that things are exciting with the Scala Choir, even though the record company that owns the CD is not cooperating AT ALL. It can be bought through the choir’s website … I won’t explain how, it’s pretty complicated. John has the same pipe dream I do: to bring the kids here and trot them around. Lots of good things to do …

And it all brings back the Berkshire Choral Festival and my last Epiphany … when I realized that I’m on this planet to build community through music. When I realized that God and love and music (and …) are all really the same thing. I’m living that now, when I remember. Well no, I’m living it anyway, but sometimes I forget that I’m living it.

And I think of Mommie. Would she be horrified to find me wrapped in religion, even if it’s only in my own distinctive way? Well no. Mommie never really cared what I did or how I did. I understand that now. She just wanted me to be happy, the one thing I couldn’t do for her. And now … it’s not that I am happy, it’s that I know how to be happy, and I think that that would do it for her.