Patrick Comerford
The Christmas trees are down in most homes, and many of them have been collected in the last few days in the Milton Keynes area in a fundraiser for Willen Hospice. The Christmas decorations have gone from most of the shop windows in Stony Stratford and the Christmas lights along the High Street are due to come down any day now.
The liturgical purists among us want to insist that the Christmas season continues until Candlemas or the Feast of Presentation. But for many, Christmas is well and truly over, last week’s New Year celebrations have been forgotten, along with those half-hearted New Year resolutions we made, and Epiphany – whether we celebrated it on Sunday (4 January) or yesterday (6 January) – has been and gone.
My Epiphany-themed postings in recent days have returned to reading TS Eliot’s poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’, written in 1927 published in his Ariel Poems in 1930, and looked at the differences in Greek and in the Orthodox Church between Epiphany (ἐπιφάνεια, epipháneia) and Theophany (θεοφάνεια, theopháneia).
But over the last few days I have returned to reading about another ‘Epiphany’ moment, prompted by reference by Canon Alan Hodgetts in his Epiphany sermon on Sunday in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford.
Alan quoted the poem ‘The Work of Christmas’ by Howard Thurman (1899-1981), an African-American theologian, which I cited in my prayer diary posting early yesterday (6 January 2026). He also told of Thomas Merton’s well-known epiphany and mystical revelation in Louisville, Kentucky. In his journal about the world of the 1960s, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday, 1966), Thomas Merton wrote:
‘In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness …
‘This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud … I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed … But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.’
Thomas Merton had been a Trappist monk for 17 years and he was on an errand for his monastery in the middle of an ordinary day on 18 March 1958 when he had this ‘Epiphany moment’. It changed his life and has influenced countless other people.
The experience became a turning point in Merton’s life, breaking down the barriers of monastic isolation to show that spiritual encounters can occur in the most mundane settings. It underscored his belief in the universal connectedness and unity of all people, transcending social, cultural, and religious divides.
His biographer William H Shannon says that by the time of this experience, Merton had become a very different kind of monk than the man who wrote The Seven Storey Mountain (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948). ‘One of the things going on in him was the maturing realisation, born of this contemplation, that it is not possible to leave the world in any real sense,’ Shannon writes. ‘There is simply no place else to go … The experience challenged the concept of a separate ‘holy’ existence lived in a monastery. He experienced the glorious destiny that comes simply from being a human person and from being united with, not separated from, the rest of the human race.’
Thomas Merton turned from the world-denying monk who wrote The Seven Storey Mountain to the world-embracing monk of the 1960s as he began addressing many of the major issues of the day and to reflect on a theology of inclusivity and compassion, addressing broader issues such as social justice, racism, war and peace, the nuclear arms race and the Cold War.
When he was silenced from writing on issues of war and peace and was banned from publishing his recently completed book Peace in a Post-Christian Era, he started to circulate mimeographed copies of these banned writings, including his Cold War Letters.
After his experience in Louisville, Thomas Merton wrote to James Baldwin: ‘I am therefore not completely human until I have found myself in my African and Asian and Indonesian brother because he has the part of humanity which I lack.’
His vision has democratised the notion of mystical experience, affirming that the sacred can be found in secular, urban environments. It is a story that has since become a cornerstone in discussions of Christian mysticism, inspiring a spirituality that embraces both contemplation and active engagement in the world.
The story became so famous that the city of Louisville erected a plaque at the site in 2008 to mark the 50th anniversary of this experience. It is probably with a historical marker in the US that marks a mystical experience. A constant flow of visitors, from ordinary people to popes, continues to visit the corner of Fifth and Walnut that was life-changing for Merton and for all who read his works.
But, as I was reminded of Thomas Merton’s ‘epiphany moment’ on Sunday morning, memories came back too of one of my own minor ‘epiphany moments.’
I have written and spoken many times about my principal ‘Epiphany moment’ when I was 19, when I visited the chapel in Saint John’s Hospital, Lichfield, and had a life-changing experience that has remained with me ever since, one that I have described as a ‘Self-Defining Moment’. Some time after, still in my late teens or early 20s, I had another experience on the London Underground in the early 1970s that can only be understood in terms of another ‘Epiphany moment’. Although it was less dramatic than that experience in Lichfield in 1971, it was still a moving one, and memories of it came back on Sunday morning as I listened to Alan Hodgetts.
I was still naïve and not long out of school, studying through sponsorship from Jones Lang Wootton for a BSc at the College of Estate Management, then part of Reading University, but really taking the first steps in a career in journalism with freelance features in the Lichfield Mercury and the Tamworth Herald. On my own, I could only afford to hitchhike around England and stay in youth hostels. But Jones Lang once sent me to conference in London. I can remember little about the conference apart from staying in the Berners Hotel, now known as the London Edition, off Oxford Street.
London at the time was overpowering for someone as young and as naïve as I was then, and I was overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle involved in negotiating my way through the Underground.
On one of those furtive visits to London more than half a century ago, standing in a crowded carriage, I had already learned the passenger etiquette that usually demands ‘eyes down’ and ‘avoid eye contact’.
But in one moment I became aware of two sensations. I looked around at everyone in the carriage, and felt alone in a seething and throbbing mass, all seeming to ignore me, and feeling they were one corporate collective of humanity, and I was an atomised, lone and isolated individual. I blinked, and in that moment realised that were all the same, all paradoxically alone and together, with the same feelings of both isolation and belonging, with similar feelings of hope and anxiety, joy and fear, gathered together by accident and about to scatter separately into the streets above, yet accidentally at one with one another and part of humanity.
There was no ‘me’ and ‘them’ – there could only be ‘us’ sharing the one journey through life, each and everyone of us made in God’s own image and likeness. And I was already on that journey.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, …
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation
– TS Eliot, ‘The Journey of the Magi’
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