Refractions

  Speak up. Step up. Yesterday’s attack on the United States’ Capitol building by rioters seeking to disrupt the work of the American congress, egged on by months of the president’s unhinged rhetoric – and perhaps more immediately by Rudy Giuliani’s call for “trial by combat” – is over. But the spiritual realities that nourished it remain.  All this on the western Christian feast of Epiphany, whose central act is the visit of the Magi, first to King Herod and then to the little family in Bethlehem.  That visit is followed closely by the first attempt on Jesus’ life, by means of the extra-judicial murder of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two. As was the second – and successful – attempt to bring about Jesus’ death, Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” is driven by fear and expressed as rage. Jesus survives because his father has fled with Jesus and his mother to Egypt. But the families of Bethlehem’s toddlers are shattered. I began the day as I have begun every Epiphany since