An Epiphany Story

Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. – Benjamin Franklin

Nearly forty years ago, I’d been married 18 years to a wonderful but unhappy woman, with two fine sons I was losing connection with. My work was unfulfilling. I was alienated from society, heritage, creativity (had stopped doing art years before), purpose and the spirit (stopped meditating years before); had never cried as an adult, rarely felt either joy or anger; had a cynical, judgmental, sarcastic, self-deprecating sense of humor; was more like my father than I knew, and needier for maternal affection than I knew. Depressed? Probably. Sound familiar?

Then my wife had an affair – with a musician – and our marriage broke up. I found myself falling, quite abruptly, with no preparation or road map, into an intense midlife crisis. Suddenly, I was crying every day – for her, for the family’s breakup, for all the wasted years, for my lost sense of purpose, for an inner child I’d neglected. The poet Rumi knew what I was going through:

Has anyone seen the boy who used to come here?

Round-faced troublemaker,

quick to find a joke, slow to be serious.

Red shirt, perfect coordination, sly, strong muscles,

with things always in his back pocket.

Reed flute, ivory pick, polished and ready for his talent.

You know that one. Have you heard stories about him?

Pharoah and the whole Egyptian world

collapsed for such a Joseph.

I would gladly spend years getting word of him,

even third- or fourth-hand.

I began to realize how much of life I’d missed by constructing an emotional shell; heard that the only heart worth having is a broken one; heard that each partner in a toxic relationship secretly desires for the outbreak of something new, but that only one has the courage to begin; started therapy, got Rolfed, did breath work; got more comfortable in my body; went to men’s conferences; heard Robert Bly talk about Iron John; heard him describe the hand that reaches out from the underworld and drags down those who refuse the call to go there themselves; joined a men’s group; got interested in ritual, initiation and mythology: heard Bly recite Antonio Machado:

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.
‘In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.’
‘I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead.’
‘Well then, I’ll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.’
the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
‘What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?’

One of the members of my men’s group was a guy named Fred. Now this guy was depressed, and he had a proven strategy to stay there. Even I could see that whenever any of us struggled to get in touch with our feelings, Fred would quickly begin to control everything by launching into long, droning, utterly unexpressive monologues, casting such a spell on the rest of us that we almost seemed to leave our bodies. You know the type. In retrospect, one of us could have – should have – interrupted this pattern. But we didn’t have the vocabulary yet, and the group leader’s philosophy was to let us work it out on our own. Later, I learned one definition of passive aggression: avoiding feeling one’s own anger by displacing it onto others. But at the time, most of us were too clueless to know what was happening, or too polite to say anything.

One night, just before Thanksgiving, the leader suggested a theme for the evening, that we should speak about our childhood memories of the holiday. So we went around the circle, sharing all kinds of happy, sad, funny and even angry memories. We laughed; some men cried.

When the talking stick came around to Fred, however, he went into his usual pattern of droning on at great length. He recalled some memories that were “pleasant” and others that were “unpleasant” – and then he repeated himself, on and on. Once again, the excited atmosphere dissipated. Men literally started to nod off. I was struggling to pay attention when I noticed something new: none of his memories (and, I realized, nothing he had ever told us about himself) were more positive than “pleasant”, and none were more negative than “unpleasant”. He’d managed to create an entire lifestyle ensconced in a safe cave by banishing even mild intensity in any form. Once again, he’d (in current terms) “controlled the narrative”.

Epiphany: from the Greek epiphaneia, “manifestation, striking appearance, festival held to commemorate the appearance of a god at some particular place”. In Western Christianity, the feast of the Epiphany principally refers to the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child.

The particular place was the third floor in a conventional office building near downtown Menlo Park, CA. It was some kind of grace. Suddenly, I visualized that chart we studied in high school physics class: the spectrum of electromagnetic energy, where the tiny range of visible light is bounded on one side by an infinite continuum of infrared light and on the other by another infinite range of ultraviolet light. All the light we cannot see.

I realized — with a shock that brought silent tears — that I, like Fred, had lived my forty years never ranging outside that same, thin emotional range between “pleasant and unpleasant.” And for the first time, a year after my wife had left me, I silently exclaimed, “Thank God for this divorce!”

Isn’t it fascinating how some people can become – often quite unknowingly – our most profound spiritual teachers! Blessings on Fred, the messenger from beyond! Alas, poor Fred, the computer programmer. Sometime later, the group leader, who’d become as frustrated with him as the rest of us had, actually asked Fred to leave the group. There was nothing he could do for him.

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Coda 1: Three years later, I apologized to my ex. I told her that I’d finally realized that I’d been the cause of our breakup, that I hadn’t realized how much I’d needed to change, how I’d needed to break out (be broken out) of my masculine conditioning. I thanked her for having divorced me. We started talking. One thing led to another. I got right with my sons. We cried together, did ritual together, made a funeral for the death of the old marriage, started dating again. But how to introduce each other to friends? “Hi, this is my ex-wife”? My “girlfriend”? Nahhhhh...Finally, inspired by my favorite beer, we settled on “Dos Equis” (my ex-ex)! Years later, we got re-married.

Coda 2: Many years later, the man she’d left me for apologized to me for breaking up my marriage. But I thanked him for having done so, for having been another of my profound spiritual teachers, for having embodied that God of the epiphany.