My cell phone is so simple that I can't even send text messages; imagine that.

So when I look at a sleek iphone with assorted "apps"; I'm envious. It would be fun to have all those "apps".  I ‘d like an "app" for finding Starbucks, for finding The Times crossword puzzles, for finding the calories in a slice of white pizza with anchovies. Wow, the world at my greasy finger tips! But with the hundreds, maybe thousands of "apps" available, I know there is no "app" for finding the sacred in our daily lives, for sensing the presence of God in here and now. That "app" is pure grace that must be "downloading" in prayer.

Yet, I need to find such an "app", maybe we all do, that is if  we are going to keep healthy, sane and balanced in this new decade's whirlwind of  blogs, tweets, and texts. Yes, sensing God with us, Emammu-el, sensed in the ordinary mangers of our lives; it is so critical these days. And yet that's precisely what the magi, the three kings, did at the epiphany of Jesus. When God appeared, they noticed it. The magi really noticed it because they were really looking for it. They had an "app" for it, an aptitude for it.

Magi, hummm, I have always been envious of them too and probably for the same reason as "apps" on the iphone; they look so classy! Every year at our school Christmas pageant three kids were picked to dress up in the classiest costumes, with the classiest colors, and the classiest tin foil crowns and purple turbans, wow! The three elementary kings got to do classy things like bow, kneel and lie down on the school stage.  You can't beat that for classy when your a kid in 1958. (You can tell that I learned a word in the third grade, just in time for the pageant.)

In the gospel of Saint Mark, that lying down by the magi, that prostration before the child in the manger is reverence. Holy reverence is being made before a God who is sought, a God who is seen, a God whose Spirit is sensed in the most unlikely of places, in the cry of a child.

God's Spirit appeared to me in the "cry" of a child, in the voice of a friend's two year old daughter just learning to speak. I had sent her a stuffed teddy bear. And on this Christmas day when I called to wish them well, I heard for the first time this sweet child murmur, "Fanks Fawah Fwank for teddy". I cried,  because the spirit of God doesn't speak so clearly to me that often.

Perhaps, this past Christmas you too had an epiphany of God in an unlikely manger of your life.  If that is the case, then on this celebration of the this Epiphany the reasonable response is to return to God with our gift of ourselves, the gift of Eucharist, our "ekaristio", our ..."fwanks"... too.