Second Saturday Conversation – February 11, 2023

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Second Saturday Conversation

Epiphany: what we can’t see coming

Our February 11 Second Saturday Conversation falls in the Christian liturgical season of Epiphany. The word epiphany suggests a manifestation of something otherwise hidden. I suggest that what is “hidden” is not something already made. But something new, unforeseeable, “impossible.” Epiphanies underscore that the way it has been is not always the way it will be. Things can be otherwise. For me that is good news. But it implies risk.

Kierkegaard (and I am indebted to those who read Kierkegaard and highlight for me, namely thank you Jack Caputo) suggests that the difficulty with life is our wanting to make it easy. What is lacking is difficulty.

“…when all join together to make everything easier in every way, there remains only one possible danger, namely, the danger that the easiness would become so great that it would become all too easy. So only one lack remains, even though not yet felt, the lack of difficulty.” (And Kierkegaard was concerned that this lack of difficulty contributed to what he called “bourgeois Christianity.”)

Difficulty for difficulties sake is not what I am curious about. But acknowledging difficulty as honest and even hopeful is.

I look forward in this session to exploring our aversion to risk and our “lack of difficulty” and how perhaps accepting and facing uncertainty and difficulty holds more hope than burden. Help me wonder about this.

Join our Second Saturday Conversation. All sessions are free. But you need to RSVP in order to receive a link. The link will be sent out February 10 and the morning of February 11.

I look forward to our time together.

—Marianne

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