Owen and Epiphany: A Little Child Shall Lead Us




 “And a little child shall lead them…”Isaiah 11:6


When I think of Epiphany and the dawning of a new light, which I believe is an awareness of something almost miraculous and certainly sacred, I think of Owen. This beautiful, imaginative, autistic 5 year old looks at artificial canvases depicting jungles or deserts or forests, and calls them “maps”. Let’s find a way into the forest today! He shouts with glee. I look and at first all is see are flat green trees and shiny brown painted underbrush. Then I notice the figure in his hand. Is that a dog I ask? No! Ok no more silly questions on my part. I decide to simply observe and go with the flow of some extraordinary way of seeing the world. A few minutes of tapping the “not a dog” on the plastic canvas later he exclaims, as though to make sure his dull grandmother can awaken to a brilliant reality, we are in the forest now! And I think we, he, it, and I have arrived. Something like blinders fall away. It is as though a new way of being has been presented and instead of trying to change it or insert it into the social stilted calculus of judgement, meeting his broad smile with mine is enough to ignite a flame of extraordinary insight, albeit unique, albeit different. Oh that I transform some tattered expectation of ordinary expectedness into an extraordinary map of my imagination and journey unabashedly into the what you thought was a mere childlike representation of a jungle but is really a wilderness bursting with previously unseen possibility. There is a glimmer of hope and a realization that a little child shall lead us…

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