Journey of the Magi

Posted by DJL on Jan 5, 2013 in Poetry | 3 comments

Tomorrow, January 6, is the Feast of the Epiphany which falls this year on Sunday. It is the occasion, according to tradition, when the magi from the East reach the newborn Christ and offer him both their gifts and their worship. As is often true of the gospel accounts, they both describe scenes in detail and yet leave much to our imagination. We don’t know, for instance, what happens to the magi after they leave. We don’t even know, truth be told, if they become “Christians” or whether that term would have had any meaning for them.

All this and more Matthew leaves for us to fill in. One of the more famous attempts to “fill in the blanks” comes in the form of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi,” composed not long after Eliot converted to Christianity and joined the Church of England. The first five lines of his poem are actually borrowed from a seventeenth-century sermon by Lancelot Andrewes. Eliot picks up Andrewes’ first-person narrative and continues a recounting of the journey of the magi from the perspective of one of them, now an old man.

Little of the recollection is pleasant. Leaving all that was comfortable and familiar behind, the magi endured bad weather, surly companions, poor lodging and more. And when they arrived it was, at best, “satisfactory.” Curiously, there is no description of what the magician beheld, only his latter wonder at whether it was a birth or a death. A birth, of course, and yet nothing was ever the same again. He would no longer be content with what gave him joy, no longer believe the stories and religion of his youth, no longer feel welcome in his own land and culture, no longer have a place in the old world that gave him birth. In all these ways he had died…and now waited to die of it all once again and for good.

Alienation and estrangement were common themes to Eliot, perhaps the foremost of the “modernist” poets in England. Here he shares perhaps a bit of his own discomfort and lonely recognition that whatever else he may have gained from his conversation – whatever faith or hope or consolation he may have attained – yet he also lost a place in the world that had created him and he had helped create. Being born anew, he had also died. So it is for each of us. Citizens of heaven, we are also citizens of this world and perhaps feel at times caught between the two.

Or do we? I wonder, at times, if I have not become too comfortable with my life in this world, too invested in advancing in it, too enmeshed in its values, to appreciate both the loss and the gain to which Christianity beckons us. As Bonhoeffer once said, “When Christ bids men and women to follow, he bids them to die.”

Hard to do. But, then again, maybe it’s not a “doing” after all. Maybe, like this old magician, we are simply confronted with a new reality that calls the old one into question, replacing the status quo with which we had grown comfortable with a new reality that simultaneously demands and offers more than we can imagine. If so, is it birth or death we witness, birth or death that we are invited into?

Worthy questions.

“The 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, sorefooted, 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 arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might 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, from Collected Poems, 1909-1962 .

 

Post image: “Journey of the Magi,” Sassetta Giovanni.