EPIPHANIES ARE WHERE YOU FIND THEM

Everyone knows what an epiphany is. It's what happens to atheists in foxholes. When the rookie learns how to hit the high inside ones. When you realize the person you've been sleeping with is also the person you love...!

I had my own epiphany while reading the newspaper and listening to some music. The paper was reporting the latest threats to our security and dangers to our economy. You know -- that quicksand feeling you have as you are relentlessly sucked into more and more disasters about which you have absolutely no control. And yet just as my mouth began choking on the sand, my ears caught the cadence of an old torch song.

Quite suddenly I was buoyed. Caught up from the depths of my despair and being lifted into a -- dare I presume? -- a transcendental state of serenity. The song was one of those sentimental classics about lost young love. The operative word is "young." It was from that lacy time when your young heart was, as another song put it: "Glad just to be sad thinking of you."

All of a funny sudden, the grim gluttony of bad news seemed somehow far away and apart from me. All that was out there; what I was feeling was inside here. Here, the last refuge of the sinking. You see, I told myself, the whole world may be going to hell, and yet it can still be heaven within. The heaven in which you become one with the truth of the ages -- my peace is the peace beyond all understanding.

OK, I paraphrase. But as I remember it, these were something like the words of Moses, Jesus, Buddha, and oh yes John Lennon. The point to my little epiphany was this. That which is of time passes away. But the peace which is within you and me may someday die, but it never actually passes away. It's like the many different tributaries of a mighty river which eventually all reach their delta. Then flow out into the same
ocean.

Oceans like eternity never pass away. Well, if you're an oceanographer you won't quite agree. But then that's probably because you're studying the wrong ocean....