FINDING THE EPIPHANY IN TAYLOR SWIFT’S “EPIPHANY”
Photo from Unsplash.
The Christian Feast of the Epiphany takes place every year on January 6th and celebrates the incarnation of Jesus. Here in the liturgical calendar the word “epiphany” relates to the Greek root ἐπιφάνεια, (epiphanea) meaning manifestation or appearance, rather than its contemporary definition of a sudden flash of inspiration or knowledge. The liturgical season of Epiphany lasts from the sixth of January until Ash Wednesday with readings that highlight the manifestation of divinity in the person of Jesus Christ.
So what does that have to do with Taylor Swift’s song released this July?
“Epiphany” begins with the lyricist painting the scene of a soldier “crawling up the beaches”, seeing people wounded, and seeing things that “you just can’t speak about.” This first verse is a fairly clear reference to her grandfather’s experience landing at Guadalcanal during World War II in 1942. After the chorus, she continues by imagining the anguish of a healthcare worker amidst the current pandemic, feeling vicariously the trauma of Covid-19 patients dying under her watch: “Something med school did not cover/Someone's daughter, someone's mother,/Holds your hand through plastic now.”Governors, monarchs, journalists, and even the UN Secretary General have taken up war imagery to describe the brutality of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Swift sets these two images side by side and omits any explicit war metaphors from the COVID ward. Likewise, the artist resists the deployment of any disease metaphors in the theater of war. This form acknowledges the horrors unique to each individual scene. And by setting these scenes side by side, the songwriter invites her listeners to draw the connections between the two. The comparisons and connections, however, are not systematic and rational, but evocative and emotional. Here in “epiphany” the paratactic setting abstracts the pain from each scene while also acknowledging the universality of suffering. This paradoxical—perhaps we could even say hypostatic—pull between the universal and the particular, between the transcendent and material, is the Christological foundation of our assertion that Jesus is always with those who suffer. It is the particularity of Jesus of Nazareth that speaks to the universality of Jesus the Christ.
It is this particularity of Jesus as sufferer that enabled Julian of Norwich to write in the fourteenth century, “Here saw I a great oneing betwixt Christ and us, to mine understanding: for when He was in pain, we were in pain.” (1) The mystic here writes of this “oneing” in the pain both she and Jesus individually felt as subjects. The pain each felt was their own, and yet the suffering was shared.
Taylor Swift does not leave the listener to ponder their place in all of this but continues by placing herself within the song in the first person as a way of moving forward through the horrors we encounter in life. Her chorus calls out to those across space and time with words of solidarity and empathy: “With you I serve, with you I fall down, down/Watch you breathe in, watch you breathing out, out.”
Swift, playing with perspective, time, and space, collapses the difference and separation between subject and object, identifying with the sufferer just as Christ does. When we encounter horror, when we encounter suffering and violence, and when we come face to face with death, it is a human impulse to grasp for some ascription of meaning. The singer-songwriter addresses this impulse in the bridge: “But you dream of some epiphany/Just one single glimpse of relief/To make some sense of what you’ve seen.” We grasp for meaning, but meaning is not always to be easily found. A robust theology of suffering and incarnation cannot look at the horrors of war or the horrors of a COVID-19 ward and answer with the half-truth of, “Everything happens for a reason.” (2) A robust theology answers with the presence of God. And that is what incarnation, revealed in Epiphany, is about: pointing to the revelation of Jesus Christ. And that is precisely where we find the Epiphany in this song: when there are no explanations, no comforting aphorisms, and no sudden epiphanies of meaning.
The songwriter does not provide answers or ascribe meaning to the grief and heartache that comes with horror. Instead she reaches out and places herself in the midst of the suffering. Swift does not deliver a rational, systematic song addressing theodicy or the problem of pain. What she offers is empathy, solidarity, and presence in the form of the poetry, as well as in the lyrical and musical emotion of this song. Whatever the intent of the title or lyrics, this soul-stirring song reflects a theology of incarnation. Christ is there in the suffering. And as pastors, priests, lay-people, as Christians, we reach out and live out this incarnational and Epiphanic theology by being present in those moments: present to witness, present to pray with, and present to mourn.
Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. (London: Methuen & Company, 1901), p. 41.
Kate Bowler brilliantly dismantles this kind of approach to suffering in her book Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved, New York: Random House, 2018.
