“I don’t believe in epiphanies. I don’t believe in transformative moments, as transformation is harder than a moment. I’ve seen far too many people awash in a genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realize just how difficult change actually is. But that moment, with that boy, was pretty close to me…”—J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy
Those are his words, not mine. I do believe in epiphanies. I do believe in revelation and moments lived that change perceptions, eyes, and—after—lives. Transformation is not a moment, but I believe the conditions that come for committing to change often live as such: when the scales tip and we commit to the work and effort that it will take to be who it is we wish, or know that we should be.
A small moment of read encouragement, and a kind smile seen in a time of depression and self-abasement may not have been the transformation, I agree with that, but to hear an echo of words repeated back from the universe in such—a kind encouragement to ‘be a light’ during a time of personal darkness; that led me to make that first movement in faith to become and share just that—I would call that an epiphany, a revelation that shifted sight, spirit, and soul into alignment and desire for something different than had been a focus in my life. Maybe I was on that path, but the breakthrough, epiphany, revelation and understanding had not come.
Just as he had that moment when he understood and wished to be a man who held gratitude for all in life—even something as small as an eraser—it changed his eyes from hurt, envy, and resentment for all his tribulations, and changed his spirit into something that wished first to see his blessings, not his hurts. It was a paradigm shift in spirit that redirected his after-actions. Even if the transformation to become still took time, work, and effort. Was not the moment of seeing such gratitude for the simple on that little boy’s face not an epiphany?
I don’t believe in epiphanies. Those are his words, not mine, and I wonder if he returned to the first sentence, would he write it still the same. I picked up this book because I read an essay Vance wrote about his confirmation into becoming Catholic.
That came after the publication of this book, and he credits his writing of this book as something that conditioned his spirit, in his self-examination, to receive and become a practicing Catholic.
Maybe there were no epiphanies along Vance’s course to conversion, no revelations as with Saul on the Road to Damascus, but does not God speak to us, too, in softer lights, sign in different ways, and only in retrospect are we able to see how something small changed us in magnitudes we could never have imagined?
Maybe epiphanies are not the magnificent moments we imagine, but the softer times too that, none-the-less—and often more-so—change our course in life. When Elijah waited to be witness to the presence of God, God was not in the Great Winds. God was not in the Earthquake. God was not in the Fire. God was in the still small voice. When we look for epiphanies in the grand, might we be looking for God in the wrong signs?
God wishes to break through to our hearts and receive love returned by our own free will. God does not seek to break our hearts and will. God empowers these and seeks to raise our spirits into integration with a higher design, not to keep us low. The latter is the nature and habit of the kingdoms of man, not the Kingdom of God, and why rulers have always—and will always—fear those who live by faith. They are not so easily broken as those divorced from a perception and belief in life purpose beyond one’s finite corporeal and material comforts in a ephemeral present easily manipulated by coercions and force in this world. Often, all it takes is the smallest resistance—a still small voice—to stand in resistance to bring the entire façade of world-force and power crumbling down. Is this not what Pope John Paul II did when he spoke—with one small voice—before the Communist powers of Poland, empowering and encouraging the people to raise and speak their own?
Transformation is harder than a moment. It still took time for the regime to fall, but was not such moment still an epiphany to the world—a changing of course in the trajectory of future history and world power structures perceived, then, to be fixed.
I believe in epiphanies. I believe in transformative moments, even if the labor to make them last still requires after-action through our own free will. Without the epiphanies, how do eyes, souls, and lives change course? We can give them other names, distill them from their full influence and dismiss divinity from their timing and effect on our becoming life, but that doesn’t change that they live and have effect on sight, spirit, and life all the same.
Epiphanies are not always angels from on high. They do not always appear as force that leaves us trembling in our place. Epiphanies are moments when God touches upon us through mediums in this world: a small boy grateful for an eraser, a smile when we need that light, words of encouragement when we cannot speak or find our own, forgiveness given or received when a heart is near to fixing hard, the wonder rediscovered in a sunset when our eyes are near to being blighted to the beauty in lived existence.
Epiphanies come in many ways. Often, it is our reticence to admit and see them for what they are that makes them seem so rare. We can change or deny the label. We cannot deny effect.
I believe in epiphanies. I believe in transformative moments. They are something I have lived and am not afraid to speak.