On Epiphany & Knowing God

We celebrated Epiphany at our parish recently, both in the faith formation classes I help teach and at Mass. 

Epiphany is the official start of the world knowing Christ. It was just a handful of people, the wise men and the shepherds, that he let in on the secret. Knowing Christ isn’t meant to be an exclusive club, he’s just humble. 

As I sat in the church overflowing with evergreens and lights, flowers and the Nativity scene, with simple, beautiful Christmas hymns swelling around us, I thought about the deep dive I had just taken over the weekend. I was writing an essay and as I was researching it I listened to atheists like Sam Harris, cosmopolitan philosophers like Martha Naussbaum, and the nihilist philosophy Reddit page (which is as fun as it sounds) and a few chapters of this book on Moral Relativism. 

With my mind filled with the typical arguments against there being a God, I sat in the church after receiving the Eucharist, which is to say after receiving the God they think doesn’t exist. Catholics believe the Eucharist is Jesus, and that the night before he died he gave us a way to be fed spiritually. Through the prayers of the priest, the bread and the wine become his body and blood through transubstantiation. The Eucharist is significantly foreshadowed in the Old Testament: the manna from Heaven that was sent by God each day to feed the Jewish people as they wandered in the wilderness before entering the promised land, the bread that sat in Holy of Holy places in the temple and in the Arc of the Covenant, the unleavened bread at Passover. 

As I sat there, I thought about how all of these people who are writing and arguing about God have never had this experience. They have never felt the peace, the surge of the heart that feels like the warm water swells of a tropical ocean, the glow that feels like light and truth and love, the absolute vastness of the height and depth and breadth of the experience. Truly, words fail to describe the feeling post Eucharist. 

Once, when I asked my teenage son what he experienced after Communion, he looked ahead for a minute before earnestly answering: it’s deeply meaningful. And when I put my nine-year-old to bed after his First Communion, I asked what his experience felt like. He thought about it and then said: “it was like a whomp-whah”.

That is a technical term used by theologians I am sure. But yet, I knew exactly what he meant. 

I have read enough skeptical, post-Modern philosophy to know just how they would tear apart these sentiments (repressed, brainwashed woman who has internalized her oppressor, the Catholic church, reporting instances of her repressed, brainwashed offspring). Or as Flannery O’Connor put it, though faith may seem to some a “peculiar and arrogant blindness,” it can be an “extension of vision” where by you can see the world more clearly. What critics of Christianity seem to think is we are holding on to an outdated, ancient world view and what they miss is that we are responding to a person, Jesus Christ, who is very much interacting with us today, in the present moment. The whole hullabaloo of the Cross and Resurrection isn’t just what happened then, it is what it allowed Christ to do ever since, which is to be present in the world, in the flesh. Yes he was God incarnate when he was born 2,000 years ago. But he is also God incarnate in the Eucharist, today.  

Since it was the Epiphany, the celebration of the first knowing of Christ by the world, of Christ being sought out by wise men, I couldn’t help but think about the type of knowing that all of these modern thinkers didn’t have. Because if they have never been to a Mass, and have never been in the presence of the Eucharist, how do they know? How do they know for certain that a) it isn’t God b) that God doesn’t exist c) that he has never proved it to us?

Because the love that I feel after Communion, or at prayer, feels exactly like he is proving it to us.

That is why we are Catholic. That is why we go to Mass, deep dive into the Scriptures, pray. Someone is there, meeting us. And he is more beautiful and he loves us more than we can ever imagine. If you are on the receiving end of it, that love, that grace, that peace, you know. You know that Jesus is real, that he is alive, and he loves you. It is a knowing unlike any other. 

It is fascinating to see the way writers have described the Eucharist. The writer Mary Karr tells when her 8 year old son asked her to take him to church to ‘see if God was there’, they went to all different types of religious services. When he got to the Catholic Mass, he said, that’s it. He’s there. And they converted. 

And when the writer Heather King decided to find religion, she also went to lots of different services in LA, and finally when she went to a Catholic Mass, at the consecration when they said “Behold, the Lamb of God, he who takes away the sins of the world” and the people responded, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” Right then, she knew, this is what she had been looking for. 

There is a story the philosopher Peter Kreeft tells, when he explained the Eucharist to a Muslim student. The student said, “I don’t understand.” And Kreeft replied, “I think I know what you mean. You can’t empathize with anyone who believes something so shocking. You don’t see how you could ever get down on your knees before that altar.” And he replied, “No, I don’t see how I could ever get up. If I believed that thing that looks like a little round piece of bread was really Allah Himself, I think I would just faint. I would fall at His feet.”

This story holds one of the most important parts about receiving the Eucharist: our attitude matters. Lots of people receive the Eucharist but it is this humility, and adoration, that lets you dive deeper into knowing him.  

As St Thérèse of Lisieux, a doctor of the church, tells us, knowledge of Christian truth inwardly requires and interiorly demands love for him to whom it has given its assent. She tells us that the love on which “depend all the law and the prophets” is a love which strives for the truth, and is is authentic agape for God and man. In essence, we can understand from her that though many people receive the Eucharist, those that are humbly trying to love him will know him more deeply. 

So on this Epiphany, I thank God for the gift of knowing him at Mass, in Eucharist, in prayer. It doesn’t make me any better than anyone that he lets me know him. He wants to offer this gift to everyone. He wants you to go too. But it does require humility. Just like the shepherds and the wise men had when they went and knelt before Emmanuel, all those years ago.