Today we celebrate to solemnity of the Epiphany, my friends, the story of the three royal wise men who traveled across the Eastern desert to find and pay homage to a child king who was reported to have been born in Bethlehem of Judea. More about that later.

Many people throughout history have reported seeing the face of God or at least to having heard God speak to them. I have not been so fortunate, however, I can report that on many occasions I believe that I have experienced God up close. Was it an epiphany of sorts? I do believe so. An epiphany is simply an experience when the sacred, the awesome, the breathtaking overwhelms you and you can only say: “I saw the face of God just then.”

Let me tell you of several such experiences that have left me without a human answer to life’s epiphanies.

I think I saw the face of God early one morning when Father Jim Schultz and I took the last step on the summit of the Matterhorn in Switzerland and looked straight in the sun coming up over the border of Italy. An epiphany!

Sadly, I think I have seen the face of God in tragedy. On the day, for instance, when I was called to a funeral home to take a crying mother by the arm to see her daughter who had only hours before committed suicide. I saw the mysterious face of God just then.

I have watched little kids in a school playground screaming with the pure joy for fifteen minutes of freedom.

I have seen the face of God, mysteriously, when I first learned that Father Jim Schultz, my friend and climber, had fallen off the east face of Little Bear Mountain in Colorado. He was dead; the mountains he so loved claimed him.

And finally, I think I have seen the face of God in those earthy moments when a young man and woman say, “I do.” Or when a team of young, tight-muscled high school football players celebrate a win in the last 5 seconds of a game.

All these events, my friends, are epiphanies, visions of the sacred, whether in joy or tragedy. Each time a human being is so struck by the unexplainable, that he or she can only gasp for breath and ask “why, how come?” we are face to face with God.

I believe that is what the author of St. Matthew’s gospel was trying to convey when he told that ancient story of the three royal personages from the East who came seeking someone who would tell them where the supposed King of the Jews was to be born. “Why, in Bethlehem came the answer, that small, insignificant, backwater village where nothing important in all of history has ever occurred.” Now that’s the face of God and the work of God.

And so, as the story goes, these royal princes came to visit the God king and pay their homage: Gold, frankincense and myrrh.

What astonished these men, of course, was the fact that the light of a star was constantly directing them to the place where a child lay, yes, astonishingly, a child, a king?

Somewhere in that story there must be a message for us, we who so often imagine that we live in a dull world where nothing spectacular, nothing dazzling, nothing brilliant ever happens Could it be that we have closed up our eyes to the light of the spectacular, the overwhelming, the events that draw from us a simple response…“holy smoke, how about that?”

I truly believe that there are holy events, unexplainable human experiences happening at nearly every moment of the day, just waiting for a person of imagination and insight to say, “you know, I think I saw the face of God just then.”

By the way, we do not even need to brave the miles of hot desert sands to experience the sacred. It’s all around us, free for the imagining.

The Scriptures: Isaiah 60: 1-6; Ephesians 3: 2-3a, 5-6; Matthew 2: 1-12