The Epiphany: Pulled from Fear to Truth
As C.S. Lewis shared his grief after the death of his wife, the greatest compliment he paid to her was that she wanted the truth at any price. High praise indeed but not the type we normally hear in funeral eulogies these days or when we come to celebrate the qualities we admire in other people. For Lewis, his wife’s passion for the truth confirmed and inspired his own conviction of how important it was and is for the future of humanity to seek the truth and conform oneself to it.
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis describes a disturbing development in the evolution of the age in which he lived; namely that instead of conforming ourselves to the truth, we bend the truth to what we want it to say:
“For the wise people of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For modern humanity, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of humans, and the solution is a technique.”
Lewis wrote these words in the middle of the twentieth century. In the light of almost eighty years since then, they can only be described as prophetic as our appreciation for objective truth weakens all the time. In the words of Bishop Barron, young people in particular are vulnerable to what he describes as a “deeply distorting ideology, that is not only distancing them from reality, but also making real argument about most matters of importance, including religion, virtually impossible as reality shifts and drifts according to the wills of individuals.”
The Feast of the Epiphany celebrates the arrival of the magi to the crib in Bethlehem, having followed the light of the star which led them to Christ. In this episode from Matthew’s Gospel, we are invited to see the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy that all the peoples of the earth would be led to the God of Israel with a joyful, trusting faith and bow down in worship before him (Isa. 2:3). For generations of the faithful, these wise men represent the whole of humanity whose thirst for truth propels them forward and is at the beginning of every religious quest. They are symbolic of the pull, the fascination being exerted on them by God’s objective truth and unfolding plan. The magi, like us, have felt something of the magnetism of God and his truth, leading us forward to know not just some of the truth, the whole truth. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “These figures are forerunners, preparers of the way, seekers after truth, such as we find in every age. . . . They represent the inner aspiration of the human spirit, the dynamism of religions and human reason toward Christ.”
