What Comes After

by Chris Koellhoffer, IHM   January 5, 2025

During the Christmas season, we hear once again the story of the Magi, wise ones from the East, strangers from another culture, journeying to pay homage to the newborn Jesus (Matthew 2:1-12). Sometimes a story is so familiar that we’re not inclined to break it open beyond the words we’ve heard so many times. But the story leaves us with unanswered questions: were the Magi shaken, perhaps awestruck, by what they had witnessed in Bethlehem? After their departure, did the news of Rachel’s weeping for her massacred children ever reach them? Once safely home, did they often catch themselves gazing up at the midnight sky, remembering the allurement of the brilliant star that had led them to Bethlehem? And perhaps most of all, how were their lives different because of their encounter with the child who was both human and divine?

I ask these questions because I always want to know the rest of the story. What I’m really asking is, what impact did the epiphany, the manifestation of the Holy, have on the remainder of the Magi’s everyday living? I ask because once we’ve encountered the Holy, we can’t stay exactly as we once were in the past. Whenever God is revealed to us, there’s an invitation to new and fresh ways of seeing or being, an invitation to growth and transformation.

Many of you who have followed me for some time already know my story of a formative revelation I experienced when I was in third grade. How a Maryknoll missionary visited our class to talk about his experience in Japan. How I don’t remember a single word he said. But how I do remember, and very clearly, what he did. He gave each of us a holy card with the Madonna and Child on it. The revelation for me: Mary and Jesus had Asian features.

The Maryknoll missionary had no idea what he had unleashed in my young world. I found myself stunned and deeply perplexed. Up until that moment in my eight-year-old suburban life, every holy card, every statue, every image, every stained glass window I had ever seen had a Mary and Jesus who could have been one of my German-Irish relatives. Though I didn’t have the necessary language to unpack this and articulate it at the time, I can now name this a mystical experience, a deep knowing that God is bigger—than our understanding, than our imagination, than our worldview, than our grasp.

And we need not wait for huge, earth-shattering experiences for God to be revealed. The Holy can and does appear in the seeming ordinariness of our everyday living. In a commentary on the Epiphany, SALT writes of “the small and often unnoticed ways God enters our lives in epiphanies large and small. This hiddenness is a kind of divine signature: instead of ‘showing forth’ conspicuously…God slips into the world by way of a poor family in a backwater town…” Our call is to “reflect on ‘epiphanies,’ the ways (great and small) God shows forth in our lives, and the ways (great and small) we notice or overlook these showings.”

Coming so soon after Christmas on the Church calendar, the Epiphany serves as a gentle but persistent reminder that the revelation offered to the wise ones is also offered to each of us as well. In this new year, may we cultivate an attitude of noticing and paying attention to all creation. May we take time to contemplate what is unfolding in the world around us. May we open our hearts to the wisdom offered from sometimes surprising sources: the small, the simple, those beyond our own culture, language, or religion. Let’s not let the seeming ordinariness of our lives get in the way of our deep, intuitive seeing that the Holy One is always at work in us and in our world.

Takeaway
Sit in stillness with the Holy One.
Take a few moments to reflect on the past week.
What have you noticed? Where did you give your time and attention?
What moved you or invited you to pause and look more closely?
What might the Holy One be saying to you through such revelations?
When you are finished, bow your head in gratitude for these epiphanies.

Featured photo:  Inbal Malca, Unsplash

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