Epiphanous Trickster

The 12 days of Christmas count down to Epiphany – a season of lights observed on January 6, the "twelfth day of Christmas,” when the Magi came to honor the infant Jesus. The Greek meaning of the word is "showing forth" and it clearly has is liturgical use, but the non-litugical use is probably what most people mean when they say they have an “epiphany.” That is, of course, a distinct trickster experience. What Trickster does is to bring light to show forth – sometimes all we see is appetite, cleverness, or ways to twist the world to our wants, but sometimes what we see is the wonder of life, the traps of our own perceptions, and a self realization of our tricksterhood.

I know there are lots of folk who clutch at the notion of a trickster Jesus, but my holiday reflections have really stressed that on purpose. I think that fear is kin to the same false sentimentality that surrounds the “babyjesus” at this season – a kind of crèche mentality that sees things only through the haze of a nostalgic reconstruction of a past that never existed. In fact, it surprises me how much the popular cultural dance at Christmas is manipulation of people’s need to remember the past through the sheen of a nostalgic past and how much holiday despair is the results of such sentimental manipulation .

But what makes a trickster meditation of Christmas so interesting is how much these paradoxes, oxymorons, and contraries of the mythic narrative still shows through – kings and mangers, angels and shepherds, divinity and manure, slaughter and innocents, dark and light, us and them, birth and death – remind us that Light is always for the looking!

Look, here Trickster comes walking