‘The Star of Bethlehem’  by Edward Burne-Jones (1890).

Can you feel it? Today is a day of contrasts in our sacred and secular memory: a dance between kairos and chronos, revealing the meal in our midst.

On the one hand, today marks the Feast of the Epiphany, the start of a generous seven-week season marking the transition between the thirteen days of Christmas and Ash Wednesday. The name Epiphany carries an abundance of connotations: revelation and realization and disclosure and manifestation, all with an element of surprise – an illumination of insight in which everything is transformed.

So it is celebrated in ‘sacred time.’ But our ‘profane’ time carries its own apocalypses (literally, un-veilings). On January 3rd—just yesterday, on the cusp of this feast—the United States launched ‘Operation Absolute Resolve’ against Venezuela, conducting airstrikes and capturing President Nicolás Maduro. This followed December’s naval blockade: 15,000 troops, 11 warships, the largest military buildup in South American waters since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Closer to home, our daily bread tastes quite stale: ICE  raids continue to shatter families. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Minnesota, agents conducted arrests that DHS called “the greatest gift of all.” A pregnant woman lost her husband. A seven-year-old lost both parents. Churches that once served as sanctuary now operate under threat.

As Ched Myers writes in his reflection Kings vs Kids, Matthew’s Epiphany narrative speaks directly to such moments: “The Feast of…Epiphany…offer[s] a grim reminder that there was and is a political cost to the Incarnation. Jesus was born not in a palace but in a feed trough to parents who were refugees, not royalty.  The Bible is clear from beginning to end that the Principalities and Powers of this age—represented by corporate managers and political operatives and military strategists in every epoch, not least that of the [contemporary American] oligarchy—are forever threatened by the God who invades our world from below.  In the name of national security, level orange, suspects (and all others who fit the profile) must be contained and neutralized.  The result: “A voice is heard in Ramah”—the sound of women mourning. It is the children who are always the first victims.”

The presence of Power versus the power of Presence.

The Magi: Renegade Wisdom on Another Way Home

‘Epiphany’ by Munir Alawi

Which brings us back to those wisdom figures, ‘Magi from the East’ — outsiders, magicians, likely renegade Zoroastrians from Persia who discerned the language of celestial bodies and knew that the anointed king they sought dwelled beyond the borders of acceptability.

Ched Myers, quoting biblical scholar Richard Horsley in The Liberation of Christmas: The Infancy Narratives in Social Context, says “these magoi were ‘originally a caste of highest ranking politico-religious advisers or officers of the Median emperor, then in the Persian imperial court.’ As sages and seers they wielded legendary political influence, which explains why in earliest Christian tradition they were portrayed both as ‘wise men’ and ‘kings.’  More importantly, magoi may well according to Horsley ‘have been instrumental in opposing the Hellenistic imperial forces that conquered them and other ancient Near Easter peoples… Throughout the first century C.E., there was a continuing confrontation if not outright war between the Romans and the Parthian empire to the East.  It is not difficult to imagine that the Magi would have been associated with the eastern empire in opposition to Rome.’ Their actions in Matthew are, therefore, both conscientious (saving innocent life) and politically subversive of Herod (who was aligned with Rome).”

These weren’t naïve stargazers but trained priest-astronomers, hereditary keepers of an ancient wisdom tradition. The Greek historian Herodotus noted their fame throughout the Middle East for dream interpretation and stellar knowledge—and from their name we derive our word magic, suggesting how advanced their understanding appeared to outsiders. They may have been following their own tradition’s prophecy of the Saoshyant—a savior figure whose coming would be heralded by celestial signs, described in the Avesta as “the Beneficent One, because he will benefit the whole bodily world.”

King Herod wishes to co-opt these magicians into his own spell of power-maintenance, and the magi pay lip-service to his reconnaissance request. But upon discovering the Christ child, adoring him, and offering their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, they heed a dream-warning: Return home by another way, steering clear of Herod’s increasingly-unhinged dictates.

(If you’re new to the story, well, as humorist Dave Barry says, I’m not making this up. You can read it for yourself in Matthew 2:1-12.)

Epiphany has it all:

• Promised liberation – the thrill of hope.
• The old order flexing its muscles in the face of its certain futility.
• Dreams, signs in the heavens, intuitive gifts and obedience to magic – keeping the emancipatory dream alive.

The Magi become icons of awakened dissidence—seekers who traveled far, trusted their own experience of the Divine, defied corrupt power when the encounter demanded it, and returned home transformed. Their departure “by another way” represents what St. Ambrose called “holy defiance”:

“The Magi came by one way, but leave by another; for those who had seen Christ, had recognized Christ, surely return better than they had come. There are two ways, one which leads to destruction, another which leads to the Kingdom. The one is the way of sinners which leads to Herod, the other is Christ which goes back to the Homeland.”

Manifesting from Being

Art detail from Edward Burne-Jones

Here we are, history repeating itself; as the Talking Heads sang, same as it ever was. What’s a waking-up human to do with this Epiphany?

We want to embrace apocalypse (revelation, unveiling), resist injustice, and actively collaborate for the common good. Yes and amen. I agree without hesitation.

But it can be tempting, in a ‘gospel’ of achievement, to only ask what gifts we, too, can lay at the feet of Christ. No doubt a thousand sermons will be preached this week (as they are many weeks) begging this very question. And indeed, it’s appropriate to reflect on what ‘time, talents, and treasure’ we’re offering to God and neighbor in the life-cycle of our interconnected planet.

But this can’t be all there is, especially after years of pandemic, racial reckoning, climate crisis, oligarchic dismantling of freedoms, and political cruelty have left so many of us so drained. Paul writes to the first-century Galatian collective to “not grow weary in well-doing,” but how?

The great news is, the grown-up Christ Child upends this mindset of univocal servitude. Jesus himself asks us, in language subversively-but-accurately rendered by the late Eugene Peterson:

Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.

– Matthew 11:28-30, The Message

Rather than abasing and aggrandizing ourselves in one fell swoop, seeing ourselves (by the dim light of our own stumbling virtues) as ‘wise’ and in a position to give Jesus something he doesn’t already have, what if we take our union with Christ seriously, and allow ourselves to receive?

Embracing the biblical narrative not only as something that happened, but as something that is happening, what gifts is the newly-rebirthed Christ child, the ever-young God, seeking to give us in this new year?

But here’s where things get interesting. In our culture, “manifestation” is often reduced to a list of acquisitions—New Year’s resolutions about what we want to achieve. The Fourth Way, a paradigm of ‘conscious development’ advanced by early 20^th-century Greco-Armenian mystic and dance instructor G.I. Gurdjieff, offers a radically different approach, reminding us that as Gurdjieff taught, “in order ‘to do’ it is necessary ‘to be.'” Most of our desires are “mechanical” reactions to external influences, conditioned patterns we’ve absorbed from family, culture, and trauma. True manifestation requires what Gurdjieff called a “strong desire for liberation”—and the willingness to sacrifice non-essential habits to feed the growth of a permanent, integrated “I.”

Before you ask what you want to achieve this year, ask who you intend to be.

The invitation is to move from the subjective state of “it wants” (where desires arise mechanically from conditioning) to the conscious authority of “I want to be” (where genuine volition emerges from essence).

The Magi’s Gifts: Tools for Inner Transformation

Irakli Parjiani (Georgian, 1950–1991), “The Nativity of Christ,” 1990. Oil on canvas

Which brings us back to gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Traditional Christian interpretation assigns gold to kingship, frankincense to divinity, and myrrh to Christ’s death. Valid enough. But deeper currents run beneath these meanings. In the esoteric traditions—including Fourth Way and Researchers of Truth ideas—the gifts represent stages of spiritual transformation. The Magi’s gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh symbolize the transfer of the essential components of the physical Great Temple to the new, inner temple of the heart.

Gold symbolizes the incorruptible and eternal—what contemplatives call the divine essence burning within each person, your true identity as what Daskalos termed a “Spirit-Soul-Ego,” recognizing the divine inheritance that exists within you. This is not metaphorical flattery but ontological fact: there is something in you that cannot be corrupted, that has never been wounded, that remains connected to Source. The Magi’s gold acknowledges this royal lineage of consciousness.

Frankincense, rising as smoke, represents spirit ascending—the “breath of life,” prayer, and conscious attention. It points to what the Fourth Way calls self-remembering: the refinement of your internal atmosphere through practices of presence. When frankincense burns, it doesn’t just smell sacred; it creates an aromatic field that alters consciousness. So too does the practice of conscious attention create a field within which transformation becomes possible.

Myrrh—used in embalming—points to the necessary death of the ego-self, what contemplatives call the dismantling of the false self. This is what Gurdjieff meant by ‘intentional suffering’—not masochism, but what Joseph Azize describes as ‘the deliberately endured friction between the desires of different impulses.’ It requires confronting what Gurdjieff called one’s ‘nothingness‘—the realization that much of what we take as ourselves is mechanical reaction rather than genuine being. Great mystics of all faiths, especially Christic, teach extensively about this: how we must allow parts of ourselves to die in order for our true being to emerge. Myrrh represents this alchemical process.

Read together, the gifts form a complete initiatic path: recognizing the divine within (gold), cultivating prayerful attention (frankincense), and surrendering attachment to the separate, reactive self (myrrh).

Who or what have your ‘personal Magi’ been?

What individuals or events bring unique gifts of wisdom that have become elements for your specific transformation?

These gifts may be small (a resolved piece of the past) or large (an unshakeable connection to Inner Spirit), but they always serve as essential tools for the journey.

The Practice of the Witness

‘We Three Queens’ by Paul Lovering

So how do we actually work with this? How do we move from mechanical reaction to conscious response?

To manifest a new reality, we must first see the old one with what the Arica School of development calls “mathematical certainty.” This requires developing what both Fourth Way and Seekers of Truth traditions call the Witness—an impartial observer within consciousness that can see our patterns without judgment or identification.

The Witness operates in what Enneagram of Personality co-originator Oscar Ichazo termed a state of “Mind-only,” where we objectively observe our ego-fixations and defense mechanisms without criticism. Daskalos taught that “the inner reaches of introspection become the outer reaches of meditation, as the exploration moves beyond the subjective experience… into the boundless spheres of consciousness.”

Here’s the key: by separating from our autopilot “mechanical” selves, we produce an inner revelation of Truth. As one Fourth Way maxim (articulated by Jacob Needleman in Lost Christianity) puts it, “Truth is the sustained consciousness of Error.” Not truth as a concept we grasp intellectually, but truth as lived awareness of what actually is—including awareness of our habitual patterns, our mechanical reactions, our conditioned responses.

What illusions are you ready to let go of so that reality can finally enter?

Think of it this way: Most of us live with a running commentary in our heads—judging, planning, worrying, rehearsing conversations, replaying grievances. This is the “many I’s” that Gurdjieff described: a thousand conflicting voices, each claiming to be “me,” but none actually in charge. Herod represents these fragmentary selves perfectly: paranoid, grasping, violent, unable to integrate around any genuine center.

The Magi’s unified purpose—journeying together, offering gifts together, departing together—models the integrated self that genuine Inner Work seeks to develop our thinking, feeling, and moving centers.

Practical Epiphany Exercises: Morning and Evening

So let’s get practical. Gurdjieff said the Fourth Way is, “if you like, esoteric Christianity.” Like the Christ Whose inner life it embodies, esoteric Christianity isn’t some abstract philosophy to collect dust on a shelf; it’s a set of life-rhythms (be-attitudes) and practices designed to interrupt mechanical patterns and develop presence. Here are two foundational practices, adapted for Epiphany:

The Morning Preparation

Gurdjieff taught the Morning Preparation as his chief practical method in final years, designed “to help the progression from sleep to waking to continue through to the fuller waking which is ‘self-remembering.'”

Upon awakening, before reaching for your phone or allowing the day’s momentum to sweep you away:

• Sense the whole body upon waking up. Not thinking about your body, but actually sensing it—the weight, the temperature, the contact with a chair. This is where presence begins: in direct sensory contact with what is. (This is called the Preparation Exercise, and can be profitably done for 15-30 minutes upon rising.)
• Speak out loud, feeling these words reverberate in your solar plexus: “I am, I can; I am ‘can.’ I am, I wish; I am ‘wish.’ I am.” (this is called the First Assisting Exercise.)
• Bring attention to all three centers: What do I think? What do I feel? What do I sense in my body? Gurdjieff taught that we have intellectual, emotional, and moving centers, and most of us live lopsided, overusing one while neglecting others. Morning Preparation invites all three to the table.
• Set intention: “Today I will practice following the Star—keeping some attention on inner contact with Spirit and Self rather than letting it all dissipate outside of me.” The star the Magi followed didn’t blaze continuously; it appeared, disappeared, reappeared. So too does presence. We practice noticing when we’re awake and when we’ve fallen back asleep.
• Choose one ‘alarm clock’ for the day—a specific recurring activity when you will stop and observe yourself. Every time you open a door. Or every time you reach for a glass of water. Let this ordinary action become a bell that calls you back to presence.

You can follow along with this contemporary articulation of the Daily Preparation, if you’d like:

Initiate these practices each morning to “break the tempo of ordinary life.” Intend to decouple from the “inner chatter” and decide to strike a new note for your year—a way you wish to behave and relate that you will trust even when the world attempts to disturb it. Try this for a week, and see if you’re open to renewing it for another week – no matter if you got it ‘perfectly’ in week one or not. (Hint: You won’t.)

The Nightly Review

The Evening Review echoes both Pythagorean practice and the Ignatian Examen. Gurdjieff instructed students to “try to conscientiously and with all one’s concentration, try to remember, as on a movie film, everything one had done during each entire day.”

Before sleep, as you’re lying in bed:

• Light a candle (if safe to do so) as symbol of the Magi’s star.
• Review the day as if watching a film: Not judging, not fixing, just observing. Where was I aware? Where was I mechanical? The practice is to see without the usual emotional charge—neither inflating our successes nor wallowing in failures.
• Notice: When did I follow my own “star” (inner guidance)? When did I return to “Herod” (fear, ambition, false security, the need to control)?
• Identify what mechanical patterns are asking to be released. What needs to die so something else can be born?
• Ask: Where is Christ appearing in unexpected, humble forms in my life? Because here’s the thing: the Magi found not a palace but a peasant house, not a warrior-king but a vulnerable infant. Where are you looking for God in places that reinforce your expectations rather than shatter them?

This examen begins revealing your authentic “I” from its reasonable facsimiles, allowing you to “die daily” to the old so you can be born to the new.

The Epiphany Test: Egoic Goals vs. Genuine Calling

Art by Eric Gill

New Year resolution culture promotes ego-driven “manifestation”—visualizing desired outcomes to attract them into being. Epiphany offers a different paradigm. The Magi didn’t visualize what they wanted and summon it; they followed something beyond themselves toward an encounter they couldn’t have predicted.

Who knows what we can discover? As Mother Theresa said, Christ often arrives in the most “distressing disguises,” as the people and situations we least expect. Paula D’Arcy concurs: “God comes to you disguised as your life.” Even common shrubbery can be the Tree of Life in drag.

Cynthia Bourgeault names Jesus’ path as conscious love: “’love in the service of inner transformation’—or if you prefer, ‘inner transformation in the service of love.’” This differs radically from ego-driven desire. As she writes: “Wanting, craving, needing—these always lead to hurt… When we move to a deeper place, we discover that we can’t be hurt, just as the other can’t give us what we most want.”

Richard Rohr’s True Self/False Self distinction parallels this precisely. The False Self is “our launching pad: our body image, our job, our education, our clothes, our money, our car, our sexual identity, our success.” It corresponds to Gurdjieff’s “personality”—everything artificial we’ve learned and acquired. The True Self “is who you are, and always have been in God… The great surprise is that ‘you,’ or who you think you are, have nothing to do with its original creation.”

So how do we distinguish ego-driven goals from genuine calling? Here are some questions to sit with:

• Source check: Does this desire arise from True Self (essence) or from conditioning (personality)? Am I wanting this because I think I should, or because something in me genuinely hungers for it?
• Three-centered check: Does this intention engage head (makes sense), heart (carries genuine feeling), and body (creates energy)? Or is it all in my head, a “good idea” that doesn’t land anywhere else?
• Herod test: Am I pursuing this for external validation, security, power, or accolades? Is there a desperate quality to the wanting—a sense that I won’t be okay without it?
• Star test: Does this direction feel like following something luminous I don’t fully understand but sense is true? Am I willing to not know exactly where it leads?
• Transformation test: Will pursuing this require me to “go home by another way”—to change, grow, leave old patterns behind?

An esoteric legend from Daskalos’ tradition describes how the Magus Melchior broke the tip of his sword and placed it at the feet of the Christ child, stating, “At Thine immaculate feet, O Logos, be all authority.” This represents the Sword of Initiation—a surrender of personal ego-authority to a higher divine intelligence.

What sword-tip are you being asked to break?

What claim to be in control must you lay down?

Manifesting Your Desires is Like Planting a Garden

The Three Magi, Byzantine mosaic, c. 565, Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy

Most people focus only on the blossoms (the results), but the Feast of Epiphany asks us to focus on the soil (our being). The gifts of the Magi are the nutrients we work into that soil so that the “mustard seed” of the Christ-consciousness within can grow into a tree large enough to shelter others.

As Anthony de Mello reminds us in his Wellsprings: “The Kingdom is like a mustard seed… let it grow and it becomes a tree, big enough for the birds to come and nest among its branches.” What small seed of “holy desire” will you plant this Epiphany, to shelter a world in need of your unique light?

Because let’s face it: Globally, nationally, and in so many of our more intimate localities and lives, this past year has been—there’s no polite way to say this—a $#!tshow. So many of us in pastoral, prophetic, care-giving and good-neighborly roles…and any of us who seek to follow Jesus in honoring the Greatest Commandments…find ourselves tired, worn-out, and burned-out.

In the face of this fatigue, will I react or respond?

What might come from allying with this unexpected pain in my life, befriending it instead of be-foeing it?

For me, one of the ‘gifts from the East’ I’m seeking to receive is that pearl of Buddhist wisdom: If you’re falling, go ahead and dive.

When I’m faced with a year that includes military adventures in Venezuela, ICE raids at Christmas, continued climate crisis, and the stresses of attempting to parent, work, and live into apocalyptic times as though ‘everything’s fine,’ I’m tempted to crawl under a rock and be a ‘no’ to what’s going on. But what if things aren’t happening to me but for me?

When Christ—disguised as my life—gifts me with something that at first blush I don’t welcome, it can be so counter-instinctual to dive into what I haven’t chosen.

But what’s the alternative? The temptation is to grasp onto what I perceive I’m losing—to steady myself on what’s passing me by.

And what does this get me? Misery!

Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is uniquely borne of resisting what-is. When strong currents rush around me, I can either fight them (and exhaust myself) or make myself as hydrodynamic as possible, entrusting myself to the River of Life to carry me through.

Can I relax this habitual clenching of my inner being, to try something different just for a moment? Might I find that I can float?

“By Another Way”: The Paradigm of Conscious Choice

The Wise Ones © Jan Richardson

The Magi’s return “by another route” represents sacred redirection—an act of holy defiance against collaboration with destructive power, and alignment with the currents of an unsentimental, piercing, courageous Love. Having encountered this Love enfleshed, they could not return unchanged.

This becomes the central Epiphany invitation: What “Herod” have you been reporting to—what patterns of fear, ambition, false security, or destructive compliance? Having encountered the Divine in vulnerable, unexpected form, what new way calls you home?

The contemplative task for Epiphany 2026 is not resolution but transformation—not achieving ego-goals but following the star toward encounters we cannot predict. The Magi’s gifts provide a framework:

Gold: Recognize the divine essence within yourself and others—especially those empire marks as expendable. This is the gift of consciousness, of self-remembering, of presence to what actually is.

Frankincense: Cultivate practices of ascending attention—Morning Preparation, Evening Review, moments of “stopping” throughout the day. Like incense rising, let attention move from mechanical identification toward witness consciousness.

Myrrh: Accept the deaths required—of false self, of mechanical patterns, of comfortable collaboration with systems that destroy. The Magi had to let their assumptions about what kingship looked like die in Bethlehem. We must let our conditioned expectations die to find what genuinely lives.

What realizations might Wisdom—Sophia in all her glory—bring to us, as we continue to open-handedly hold the emancipatory promise, together?

What vast new intelligences and compassions might we manifest as we dive hands-first into this new year?

What gifts might the reborn Christ have in store for you this Epiphany?

And perhaps more importantly: What gifts will you let in to your own radiant heart?

Please comment below and tell me what’s stirring in you.

—

This reflection builds on versions originally written January 6, 2019, January 9, 2021, and January 6th, 2022. Updated for Epiphany 2026.

Related posts:

The Gifts of Epiphany: What Will You Manifest? From Holy Week to Holy Work: An Easter for the World Becoming Changing the World with Faith, Hope & Love: Ecology, Identity, Class & Solidarity in the Way of Jesus with Joerg Rieger! Receiving an Unshakable Kingdom | Your Invitation to the Magdalene Pilgrimage