I was fortunate to have recently read this essay from 2016 by author Laura Kelly Fanucci. It is not an easy story to read for a number of reasons. If you stick it out through the end, though, you learn that great joy often emerges in the most unexpected places.
For Fanucci, it was witnessing the transition from life to death, not necessarily a joyous experience. In this case, the event brought her and her husband “inside the heart of God.”
“…so deep and enduring was what we experienced. It is anchored in every fiber of my body from now on,” Fanucci writes about the events. Her epiphany was this: “When we expected despair, we discovered nothing but love.”
One of the definitions of epiphany is “an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure.” It’s like a lightbulb moment that directs the course of future endeavors. For the Catholic Fanucci, the epiphany was that there’s nothing to fear because God’s world is ultimately about love.
Most of us aren’t going to have such intense and heart-exploding instances of epiphany, but we can take away important wisdom from someone else’s lightbulb moment.
If the world is about love, maybe we should be looking for that more often. If we told other people and the word spread, maybe we could lessen the anger that seems to be gripping our country. If we weren’t so worried about what’s going to happen from one moment to the next, maybe we could find that joy and love right where we are.
Happy epiphany.
💕