Journey of the Magi

 

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

(T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi, 1927, Collected Poems 1909-1962, Harcourt, 1963).

When Eliot wrote his famous poem, the magi all still arrived on the same day every year. Now, thanks to the late 20th-century liturgical calendar reforms, they come early in the U.S. - this year two days early. That also means we get only 10 "Days of Christmas" this Year, hence no "11 Ladies Dancing" and no "12 Lords a Leaping" this year, at least in the U.S.).

I don't know how cold it really was for the magi. Eliot calls it the very dead of winter. Whatever it may have been there and then, it certainly has been a cold coming for them this year. Eliot's poem portrayed a cold world not just in weather, but a cold-hearted world, which certainly is what the magi would be encountering in their journey this year.

Of course, we know next to nothing about the actual magi, the ones Matthew's Gospel tells us about. We have counted them as three because of the number of their gifts, and crowned them as kings because of the resonance of Psalm 72. From the title Matthew gives them we can assume they were wise. From their behavior, we infer that they were seekers - not New Age dilettantes but genuine seekers searching for life-changing truth, which indeed they found not in Herod's palace but in a much less unexpected place a short distance away. Bethlehem was just a few miles away, but it might as well have been a world away not just for the power politicians at Herod's court but for the religious and cultural elite. They were the academic intellectuals of their time, learned scholars who completely missed the point of their learning. They correctly discerned the place to go, but unlike the true seekers, the magi, they stayed home, clinging to the comforts of the status quo.

Matthew tells us that when the star reappeared, the magi were overjoyed. The politicians stayed put, as did the intellectuals, but the truly wise went forward, following the star and finding what they sought. The magi set out as true pilgrims – and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother … prostrated themselves and did him homage. In the old liturgy, when these words were read or sung in the Gospel on Epiphany, everyone was directed to genuflect. It was the liturgy’s dramatic way of physically bringing the point of the story home, helping us to identify personally with the pilgrim magi, experiencing what they experienced. Our overly wordy and ritually impoverished contemporary worship deprives us of that direct physical identification with the experience of the magi. We must work extra hard to get where our ancestors arrived naturally, kneeling in homage in the presence of life-changing truth.

After Epiphany, like the magi, we too must return to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.