An Epiphany of Hope

Friday, February 4, 2022

Allegra Yvonne Gia, Maya Angelou

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INVOCATION

Light our way, O God. 

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EPIPHANY

In her book, Epiphany: True Stories of Sudden Insight to Inspire, Encourage and Transform, Elise Ballard had the inspired idea to sit down with people and ask them to tell a story of an epiphany they’d had in their lives. Here’s her interview with Maya Angelou in which Angelou shares a story of her greatest epiphany:

Well, you know, the truth is everybody probably has two hundred-fifty epiphanies. The way you’re changed at ten prepares you to be changed again at fifteen, but you couldn’t have been changed at fifteen had you not had that change at ten. You see what I mean? Epiphany builds upon epiphany…

The word ‘epiphany’ probably has a million definitions. It’s the occurrence when the mind, the body, the heart, and the soul focus together and see an old thing in a new way… 

When I was maybe twenty-two or so, I was studying voice, and the voice teacher lived in my house and rented from me. He taught a number of accomplished actresses and singers, and they all studied in my house. So I knew them slightly. But they were all white, and they were accomplished, and many of them were forty years old and had been written about in the San Francisco newspaper, where I lived at the time.

Once a month, the voice teacher asked us to come together and read from a book called Lessons in Truth. We all would read a page, or a half a page, whatever he assigned. And at one point, I was reading and read the line, “God loves me.”

And he said, “Read it again.”

So I read it again, “God loves me.”

He said, “Again.”

And suddenly, I became embarrassed.  I was young and black, and everybody else was white and accomplished.  I felt he was really embarrassing me. Putting me on the spot.  So I read it with ferocity, forcefully, “GOD LOVES ME!”

And, at that moment, I knew it.  I knew it!

I thought, “God?  That which made bees and mountains and water? That?  Loves me?  Maya Angelou?  Well then there’s nothing I can’t do.  I can do anything good.”

Even now, telling you this some fifty years later, it still brings goose bumps to me.  I could weep with joy at the knowledge that I am loved by Love Itself.

My great epiphany came when I read these words from Brene Brown: “Hope is not an emotion; it’s a way of thinking or a cognitive process.”  And another epiphany hit me when I heard her say, “Hope is a function of struggle.”

So it is, I thought.

And now, here we are, cultivating a practice of hope. 

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BENEDICTION

May you walk a path illuminated by one epiphany after another. May you see old things in a new way.