By The Rev’d Phil Wales
A few days before Epiphany, I was shopping in my local supermarket. For a brief moment, after I had turned to walk down one of the aisles, I was unexpectedly rooted to the spot. Shop assistants were hurriedly clearing the remaining unsold Christmas stock to make way for the first batches of Easter chocolates. I half-wondered whether, in the next aisle, I might be confronted by the additionally anachronistic prospect of shelves being filled with Halloween masks.
The hollow promise of our modern lifestyle, that all our desires can be satisfied instantly, or anticipated before we have properly recognised them, is always seeking new ways to keep us under its spell. That moment in my local grocers felt like one. Perhaps it was the bizarreness of the scene that drew more attention to this seductive delusion than might usually be the case.
Returning home after my discombobulating consumer experience, I glanced again at my Christmas cards. I had already decided not to pack them away after the Twelve Days of Christmas. They will be staying put until Candlemas. This is not only to help me look back with fondly to the joy of Christmas Day, but a considered, purposeful choice to stay present. The Church’s seasons, each of them, are holy spaces in which we are given time to dwell, to notice, and to allow the meaning of the incarnation to unfold gradually, unevenly, slowly, over a lifetime.
One of the current guises of the shallow promise I mentioned is the siren song of frictionless living. We hear it sung everywhere. You may hear it when we try to insist that life should move effortlessly, that nothing should interrupt our individual progress. More than this, frictionless living creates a hubristic sense of entitlement. If our expectations are not met immediately, then it must be the case that someone somewhere must be to blame. More than this, that someone, whoever they are, can, should, must make it right, right now.
Which is, perhaps, why I have found myself becoming more interested in the importance of friction. This is not an act of contrariness on my part, but something deeper. Friction is, I realise, not an inconvenience to be side stepped, it is one of the fundamental physical properties of the universe. Without friction, life does not become beautifully effortless; life on earth simply cannot exist.
The season of Epiphany, which my supermarket aisles left no room for, resists the fatal lure of frictionless living. During Epiphanytide, God, revealed in the newborn Christ, does not remain at a safe, cosy romantic distance, as an infant in a crib. God does not stay small forever. Instead God begins to reveal how completely he chose to enter human life. And God’s decision comes with resistance built in to it.
During Epiphany, God does not smooth out the friction of his divine intervention; rather God reveals more of himself through it and what our life in Christ may become as a result. This season invites a particular kind of faithfulness: a giving up of the desire to flatten things out and tidy things away. I am still discovering what it means to stay with this kind of holy friction during these weeks in January rather than hurry on past.
Happy Epiphanytide.