Epiphanies and the Eleven O'Clock Number

Martha Hodges - 2007-01-07

When I was a little girl, our biggest treat was for the whole family to take the five-hour drive south from Ithaca to the big city, to Manhattan. I remember lying awake in the hotel room, with the yellowish light from the street filtering through the curtains, listening to the muffled sounds of taxi horns from far, far below on the streets of “the city that never sleeps.” We would do all kinds of exciting and unfamiliar things, like riding in taxicabs, shopping at Macy’s, visiting the mummies in the Metropolitan Museum, and feeding the pigeons in Central Park. In fact, even today, the smell of bus exhaust fumes sends a little thrill of excitement through me. For me, it remains the smell of New York City, as experienced by a little girl of six or eight or ten.

The high point of any trip to New York was attending a Broadway play, or even better, a musical. There’s simply nothing like it—the hush as the lights fall; the tiny glow of yellow lamps in the orchestra pit magically appearing out of the blackness; and then—the opening chords of the overture. It’s a moment of mystery and anticipation almost too much to bear.

In those days, Broadway shows started at 8:30. Toward the end of the second act of a musical, according to the formula, the main character would sing the show-stopping song known as the 11 o’clock number. This was the emotional climax of the show. The moment when the character has a major revelation about himself or his story, reaches a turning point in his life, undergoes an emotional moment from which there is no turning back. This is the number that reveals what we might call the theme of that character’s life: what drives her, her true purpose and emotions, the identity that has been simmering below the surface, just waiting for the right moment to burst into song—quite literally. It gives a lift to the audience—an emotional and energizing catharsis before the show winds down to its foreseeable conclusion.

I sometimes like to play with the idea that we are authors of our lives, creating stories in which we, of course, are the main characters, the heroes of the tale. No doubt we do each see ourselves as the center of our particular stories, with everyone around us playing major or minor supporting roles, or filling in as extras. But what if the piece of drama we are creating with our lives were actually not what people in show business call “legitimate theater” but musical comedy? Or not some rambling epic of a novel, but a Broadway musical? If this were the case, what, I wonder, would be my, or your, eleven o’clock number? The moment when everything suddenly becomes clear and we see the point of the story? The moment when we suddenly see where the story was headed all along? The moment of epiphany?

I decided to talk to you today about epiphanies because yesterday, January 6th, was the Christian Feast of Epiphany, and I’m always intrigued by the potential that religious myths hold as metaphors for our lives, for the human condition. In the Christian story, the great revelation, the epiphany, is the manifestation of the Christ child to the gentiles—those wise men, astrologers or magicians from Persia, who, according to the story, fell on their knees in sudden recognition that they were in the presence of divinity. I asked myself what kind of significance this story might have for those of us who don’t find meaning in the literal interpretation of this story of the three kings, or wise men. Clearly, the manifestation of the divine, or if you prefer—the revelation of truth—is something that we can understand, that we can look for and find parallels to in our own lives. We experience epiphanies, regardless of our religious beliefs. We have our eleven o’clock numbers—many of them—in any one lifetime.

Today is also the day of my ordination. I was declared fit and qualified for the ministry two and a half years ago. I’ve been officially a minister of Unitarian Universalism since then, so what’s the big deal about ordination? It is a big deal, in the same way that a wedding is big deal even for a couple that has been living together and have considered themselves married all along, but the marriage ceremony is a public declaration and celebration and legitimizing of a commitment that has to that point been, not exactly private, but not publicly binding. So today, this congregation has agreed to make an honest woman out of me. It felt fitting to share with you how the experience of epiphany fits into my understanding of ministry—and how coming to ministry in—what shall we call it—late mid-life? toward the end of my own personal second act—feels to me like one of those eleven o’clock numbers. Not the first in my life, by any means, and I hope not the last one in my little story, but a showstopper of sorts, nonetheless.

Epiphanies, by their very nature, are fleeting. If we were to exist in a perpetual state of this kind of heightened awareness and insight, we couldn’t survive as sane human beings. In fact, this might be something like schizophrenia, or a hallucinogenic drug experience in which the mind cannot turn off the stimuli that bombard it with novelty, intense and emotional impressions that the mundane is seemingly loaded with significance that others fail to perceive.

Epiphanies are also sudden and unexpected. They come unbidden, for the most part, although mystics may bring them about through vision quests or meditation or prayer, and artists can make them happen through intense immersion in the creative process. But they are accidental for most of us. What’s more, they may leave an indelible impression on our memories, and they may change our lives, but they can seldom be recaptured. We may reawaken to them under special circumstances, especially sensory experience, like Proust and his madeleine, the cookie whose taste transported him back to his childhood, giving him access to memories long forgotten. Or for that matter, like the smell of bus fumes does for me. I know you must have similar tastes, sounds or smells that lift you out of time and space, into a kind of deja vu moment of intense recognition. Maybe it’s a song from high school, a voice that reminds you of an old lover’s, or the sight of a picture from a favorite childhood storybook.

The poem “Snow” that I read to you a few moments ago is about one kind of epiphany. The poet Macneice is sitting somewhere minding his own business, looking out a bay window, when, suddenly, the room turns “rich.” Snow and roses mix together in his imagination and he senses the relatedness of these two apparently incompatible things. For that moment, the world in all its uncontrollable variety reveals itself to him and seems more real than before. “World is suddener than we fancy it,” he writes. “World is crazier and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural.” I imagine you know what he’s talking about—that you, too, have had moments when a different kind of reality revealed itself to you. One in which seemingly incompatible things exist together, and, together, make, if not exactly sense, then a kind of rightness—crazy and joyful, spiteful and gay, and you felt the “drunkenness of things being various.”

I once read that the main thing you learn in college is how to write a paper in which you show that two completely unrelated things are actually the same. The same thing might be said about sermon writing. The preacher takes an experience from life—her own or someone else’s—and tries to show how it actually has tremendous significance and can, in fact, illuminate the human predicament. Which isn’t a bad skill to have. After all, it’s what the poet does. Poems are little epiphanies that point to the “incorrigible variousness” of the world. And, so, for that matter, are sociology papers—and sermons.

Sometimes epiphanies result in a deep sense of well-being. This sudden awareness of the inter-relatedness of things is a kind of Zen moment in which you, too, belong to and belong in this web of being. You experience a sense of connectedness that is difficult to put into words. Sometimes it’s a connection with a single other person: the mother nursing an infant, or two people in love who feel, for a moment, totally understood and accepted and appreciated by each other. Or it may be a moment of intensely felt community—an experience of belonging to other people, either particular other people, as in a congregation or family, or to humankind. A sense that you have a place, that you matter. Or it may be an epiphany of connection to the natural world, or to history, to your ancestors, or to the creative spirit of a writer that shines through a novel or a poem.

I have sometimes felt this way about this place—about you. What a gift this is, to feel secure in the faith that you may make mistakes, you may give a boring sermon or hurt someone’s feelings, or fail to find the words of comfort that someone needs to hear, but in the larger story of this congregation, you will be forgiven and held and valued. Not necessarily by every person here, but by the community. I have had this feeling with this congregation. I hope that you have felt it with this congregation, too.

Are these manifestations of the holy? I think they are. I think that the capacity to sense these connections of mutual care is a holy thing. If the word “holy” doesn’t speak to you, think of these epiphanies as manifestations of ultimate value, which is another way to say the same thing. These are moments that alter your understanding of what it means to be alive and to be human.

Life can’t be one long peak experience, nor would we want it to be. But we tend to remember these moments. And even if we forget them, they change us. When it’s time to sing that eleven o’clock number, we have no choice but to sing it. Life has been leading you toward this moment—this moment—and you can’t go back.

Families have eleven o’clock numbers. A secret is revealed; a feud is started, or settled; a disaster, a triumph; a birth, a death, a marriage or divorce. A family discovers what really holds it together or tears it apart. What it holds to be of ultimate value.

Nations have eleven o’clock numbers. The 1960s held several of these epiphanies for America. Epiphanies, remember, aren’t always happy. They can be deeply painful and their aftermath may leave a person, a family or a nation bleeding. For us in this country, the assassination of JFK was certainly once such moment, when we came together, and learned something about ourselves as a nation, but one that no one would have chosen. The Vietnam War was another. More recently, 9/11 was clearly such a moment. We have understood the world differently since that day, and we cannot go back to an earlier, more complacent vision of reality. We understand the world to be more various, and more connected than we ever knew it to be, and therein lie both the possibility of survival and the seeds of our destruction.

Today is another verse in the eleven o’clock number of this congregation. An interim period is all about epiphanies. It’s a time to seek your authentic identity as a congregation, the themes that run through your ongoing story. It’s a time to find out the nature of your connections to each other, to your minister, to Unitarian Universalism, to the larger world and to the Holy—to what you hold to be of ultimate value. Your choice to ordain me this afternoon is one more affirmation of the strength of this religious community of MVUUF. It is truly a moment of celebration for me, but it is also a time for you to celebrate yourselves and what has brought you to this point.

Like that character in the Broadway musical, our life together has been leading up to this pivotal moment. Your hopes and anxieties and mine, your values and dreams and mine, your struggles and mine, have been intertwined for the past eighteen months, in all their incorrigible variousness. When it’s time to sing that eleven o’clock number, we have no choice but to sing it. Life has been leading us—this congregation and me—toward this moment—this moment—and we can’t go back. Nor would we want to.

And when the time comes to sing out that song, we will belt it! We will sing it out loud and clear, on key or off, for better, for worse, for the whole world to hear.