"The Journey of the Magi – A Retrospective"
Roger Dick
Sunday, January 7th 2007

What a gaudy feast at this quiet time of year. It still retains its majestic Greek name and has all the colors of a fairy tale. It suggests the mysterious orient and glitters with the stiff brocade and golden icons of the great Eastern Orthodox Churches.

When my children were young, on December 6th, the Feast of St. Nicholas, we set up the crèche on the sideboard in the dining room, but the Magi started their journey in the garage. Painstakingly they made their way through the dark valley of the back hall, then climbed the highlands of the kitchen counters. Christmas found them bivouacked in the living room, still 12 feet and 12 days from Bethlehem.

Now that we’ve lived through the frenzy and our society has promptly abandoned Christmas, we’ve had this quiet afterglow in which to contemplate the meaning of that birth. Americans pride themselves on being a practical people and are not given to reflection. If it’s two weeks old, “fugedaboudit.” There’s good reason we can be dubbed The United States of Amnesia. At this time of year in particular we all look forward, to the new year, to the future, to making resolutions, to turning over a new leaf. I’ll be perverse enough to suggest that this is also the perfect time to look backward. Sometimes looking at where we’ve been is the only way of seeing where we are. Today, as we reflect on the journey of the Magi, we can also look back on our own journeys and remember where we’ve encountered Christ in his surprising disguises.

Yes, I know. The bright boys tell me, “But, Roger, they never existed. But, Roger, it never happened. But, Roger, camels hadn’t yet been invented.” And I say, “So? So what’s your point? What does that have to do with meaning?”

Aristotle, in his Poetics, says that poetry concerns itself with a higher subject matter than does history. History is concerned with concrete particulars. Poetry deals with universal patterns, the permanent possibilities of human nature. G.K. Chesterton says it even better: “It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.”

The bright boys are right; there is no record of an Ebenezer Scrooge ever having trod the streets of London. Strange, then, that we bump into him so often in the 21st century. The Bright Boys can find no birth certificate for Beauty, nor Beast. Yet Chesterton says that the great lesson of Beauty and the Beast is that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

I did not title my talk “The Epiphany,” but “The Journey of the Magi,” because the official theological description of this feast is “the manifestation of God to the gentiles” but says nothing about the human beings involved. The poetry of the legend, however, tells us that human beings, whether kings or commoners, do find themselves on unimagined journeys, following strange stars, traveling on faith only to God only knows where. They do search for God and bring him their little treasures, and God does manifest himself to mortals in the most unbelievable disguises.

And there’s more to the word than its theology. An epiphany is a sudden intuition, a moment of insight. Epiphanies should be accompanied by the words in comic books, “Shazam!” “Kerpow!” I can clearly remember my first epiphany as a sophomore at DeLaSalle High School. I was three weeks into a geometry class and thought I’d lost my mind. That Christian Brother could have been speaking Medieval Gaelic for all I knew. “A square built on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Axioms, corollaries. Isosceles, equilateral. trapezoid.” Walking home from school one day, thinking of nothing in particular, it came to me out of nowhere. I shouted in amazement, “O, I see!” Were the Magi bewildered, stunned, when they saw God made visible? Did they say to themselves, “This is what God looks like!?” Did they say, “O, I see!”

How can we not admire Gaspar, Melchior and Balthazar for their intellectual curiosity and daring, their energy and initiative, their intrepidity and endurance in traveling through strange lands to an unknown destination, their humility in seeking a being greater than themselves, their faith in moving toward a goal they but dimly understood? I’d like to think that when they arrived Mary graciously greeted them with “We welcome you wherever you are on your journey.” And their gifts are just as exotic as they are. Gold for a king, Frankincense for a priest, and Myrrh. An ominous foreboding. Almost obscene. Myrrh was a burial spice. The only thing I can compare it to is having a baby shower for some young mother and one of the presents is a little coffin.

There are such varied journeys, reluctant or enthusiastic, great or small, but even the most seemingly ordinary are usually unimaginable. Walking home from high school in those days meant walking through skid row, where one day I ran across a bum quoting Shakespeare. There’s Moses trying to squirm out of his journey: “But I can’t talk to Pharaoh, I’ve got this stutter.” There is the beginning of Christ’s journey in that striking reading from the Roman Martyrology: “the leaping down from heaven of God’s son.” There’s that black American King who journeyed to the mountaintop but didn’t live to get to the Promised Land. And our own Joan of Arc, set aflame for being aflame. And the journey of Jesus’ great, great, great, great, great, great gramma, the Moabite foreigner. John Keats imagines the song of the nightingale comforting “the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn.”

I understand we have something like 80 former priests in our parish. It’s hard to believe that God would call someone out of the priesthood. Or out of a marriage. I understand that one of the arguments against homosexuality being a life-style choice is that nobody in their right mind would deliberately choose a life in which they would be vilified, hated, discriminated against, even murdered.

In my own case, if you had told me at one time that I should be standing up here giving a talk, I’d have thought you were loony. First, I’d never heard of a parish that invited a lay person to say anything at all. Second, I’d have thought I had nothing to say. Third, I was living in Boston. Every now and then I tell Anna Mae that, if I were a novelist, I wouldn’t have the imagination to create a character like her. But I could say the same thing about my small Christian community. That may say something about the paucity of my imagination, but I’d prefer to think it says something about the unimaginable strangeness of life.

The Bright Boys tell me the Magi never existed. I say, “Yes - and they are us.” In fact I’m nominating them as auxiliary patron saints of this parish.

This time after Epiphany is a transition, and I sometimes wonder how we get from Christmas to Lent, from the crib to the cross? It strikes me that T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi,” is the perfect bridge. It echoes with that ominous gift of myrrh and carries its own foreboding. Those “three trees on the low sky.” The “six hands dicing for pieces of silver.” Eliot creates a dramatic monologue in which we can eavesdrop on the musings of an old man, trying to make sense of that journey he took long, long ago.

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 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 hostile 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 wine-skins.
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.

We welcome you wherever you are on your journey.