Epiphany: A day for fruitcakes

“We three kings of Orient are” is a familiar line this day, the first day of Epiphany in the liturgical calendar. It is the discovery of an intrusion from outside symbolized by the Magi’s visit of the infant Jesus in Matthew’s story.

The monk Thomas Merton expressed his feeling of epiphany when he wrote: “It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race…like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake. I have the immense joy of being man (sic), a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate…. [We] are all walking around shining like the sun” in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.

The celebration of Christmastide marks an ending of a Jesus-turned-Superstar’s birthday party and a beginning of a life journey, now festively exploding in the gastronomic display of crab cakes at the onset of the carnival in New Orleans, to the great fruitcake toss in Colorado when royals, jesters, and fools thrust cake projectiles the farthest.

Today is a fruitcake celebration in an awakening to the fact that we engage in the universal practice of deception, revealed in our shared pleasure/disdain of Snowden’s exposure of the NSA’s massive eavesdropping on our private affairs.

Intelligence gatherers are wont to say: If you haven’t got anything to hide, you haven’t got anything to be afraid of. The truth, of course, is that everyone has something to hide, or, at least, something we would prefer not to look directly at, if at all!

Let me start where I am, in China, a land of indirection by design, and avoidance in practice. As a first activity in my class, I ask students to fill up a profile form. This invites students to start thinking about themselves, a subject they do not need to read a book about, but is the subject of their oral English discourse. Keeping “face” (mianzi) where good appearance is bestowed and maintained at all cost and by all means is universally observed. To encourage students to speak about real things rather than fiction, “Face stays outside the door” is my class admonition. Giving up mianzi is like pulling teeth but it is one of the lessons students learn by the end of the semester.

But we are ahead of our story. After a student writes name, date, and place of birth in the form, it asks what their parents do, then ventures into what they like, think, and do; also, what they plan to be in the future. Invariably, a student is brave enough to say: “This information is secret.” Personal accounts in China are private, with mist in haze rather than clarity applied in pompous talk laced with metaphors and abstractions.

Movie director Zhang Yimou made a point by indirection in his movie Hero with Jet Li, an assassin tasked to eliminate the Qin Emperor, only to realize that the Huangdi was capable of uniting the warring states. The assassin gave up his mission. Hero in the movie title refers to the unpopular emperor rather than the well-liked assassin.

Hero came out after Mao died and some officials suggested that perhaps it was time to pull the helmsman down from his pedestal. Yimou’s response, though metaphorically delivered, was clear: say what you will about the Chairman but he united China. The same point was officially made, though in low tones, during Mao’s 120th birth anniversary this Dec. 26.

Now, what has this got to do with Snowden, the NSA, and the wiretaps on our phones?

The reason we do not wish to be “found out” is that we are all guilty of deception. We do not like who we really are! Cosmetics recommend makeovers so we won’t look the way we naturally do. Advertising convinces us that we are not whole unless we purchase a good or a commodity. If we don’t, we are made to feel less, so we work harder, leaving us anxious and tired most of the time. Then, we buy imitation brands on the cheap and wear them knowing that we are unable to pay for the real thing. 

Many foreign workers on Saipan go home to pretend who they are not! That’s not a critique. It is an acknowledgement that we all play the game of pretend! I wore a pair of loafers in Honolulu once and my sister was impressed that I could afford a pair of CD shoes. It was not, however, a Christian Dior but a Chrisdien Deny, with the word monsieur under the label.

Society follows escape mechanisms so that we do not face the truth that “life is never the way we want it.” The real point of liturgical confession is to acknowledge that we really do not wish to live the life we have. Original sin sees the truth of nakedness as shameful; it would rather dress it up or deny it. In our evolution to be human, we have discovered a highly tuned ability to deceive, and to stay that way with ease and comfort.

“Fruitcake” is a pejorative term we use of the unpredictably wild and wooly way beyond extremes. I do not condone nor justify NSA’s snooping, but I understand why we react vehemently over the violation of our privacy. I am glad there are fruitcakes that mirror the truth! Snowden is a fruitcake. May there be more like him, today and evermore!