Christmas IV – Epiphany

Christmas IV – The Solemnity of the Epiphany

_{Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72; Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6; Matthew 2:1-12}

“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.*

What the Gospel records in one phrase, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem; T. S. Eliot in his poem, Journey of the Magi lingers over in unsympathetic detail: an unanticipated hard, demanding and taxing journey, regrets, camel men running away, night-fires going out, lack of shelter, hostility, high prices, the lack of ideal conditions, inner voices causing misgivings, foolishness.

Poets know that the journeys of our lives are more important than the arrival. Epiphany invites us to reflect on the most important of life’s journeys to encounter God in Jesus Christ.

Like Eliot’s journey of the magi, the spiritual life is demanding and taxing. It often occurs in fits and starts. And yes, there will be regrets along the way. The good times summoning us back to supposed better days. Those summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. We will second-guess ourselves listening to the voices singing in our ears, saying that this was all foolishness.

Thus, there is always the temptation to stop praying, especially when our expectations of prayer do not measure up to the realities of prayer. We often treat prayer like a quid pro quo – a spiritual exchange. I give and God is supposed to give back. Frustration sets in when the camel men run away, the night-fires go out, and there is lack of shelter. It is easy to abandon hope and the journey. There will be times in our life when we will feel abandoned even by God and our prayer will seem rote and meaningless, dry and windswept as any desert.

The spiritual life never happens under ideal conditions. God does not wait for us to become perfect, holy, and sinless. This human–divine encounter occurs in the daily messiness of life. We want everything to be in place. We want to make sure we’ve gone to church for clearance and are clean, bags packed, shoes blacked, wings sown on…** But God doesn’t care about those things; God cares about us. The ideal situation in which the spiritual life occurs is always NOW! This moment! Our only response? Surrender. See, the gold, frankincense and myrrh are not about Jesus but about us.

As we seek to encounter Jesus, we must surrender our gold, that is, our power, our arrogant self-assurance, our controlling power over other people.

We must surrender our frankincense. All the ephemeral, fleeting, temporary aspects of life that we grasp and hold on to but can’t because they slip from our hands like the rising smoke of incense and are gone, our hands grasping emptiness.

We must surrender our myrrh, our death dealing ways. Our hates, our slanders, our self-destructive ways of living, and all the obstacles we put in the path of other people so they cannot experience the fullness of life and instead wither.

Our power, our brittle humanity and the death dealing aspects of our lives must be put before Jesus Christ. These gifts are what Jesus transforms that we might have life eternal. This transformation will cause fierce conflicts within us. It will be painful to open the grip of our hands that have been grasping for so long these parts of our lives.

Eliot’s question is relevant. 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.

The spiritual life is a Birth unto eternal life that arises from the Death to what we grasp. Both are hard and bitter.

We see this birthing in the life of the Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, who coined the term the “dark night of the soul” to describe the demanding aspects of the spiritual life. We find it in the letters of Teresa of Kolkata that revealed for the last 50 years of her life, she felt no presence of God. We see evidence of this birthing in the writings of the Desert Mothers and Fathers of the 4th and 5th centuries, Paul of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero. We see this agony in the prayers 0f Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane and on the cross: Take this away from me and why have you abandoned me.

They all found ways to live within the demanding spiritual journey and abandoned neither their belief nor their work. For this journey occurred within faith.

The Gospel concludes tersely that the magi departed for their country by another way. To encounter Jesus Christ means we will never be the same. We will be changed and our lives will take a different route.

Are we up for the journey?

_______________________________________________________________________________________

*T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi

**from Mass, by Leonard Bernstein