The Journey towards Renewal

magi

Today is the Christian Feast of the Epiphany, the day celebrating the three wise men from the east visiting the infant Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  Symbolically, this captures the world’s old wisdom systems acknowledging the new dispensation of love and renewal represented by God entering the world and taking human form, the “word made flesh.”   When we have a breakthrough, we call it an epiphany.

T. S. Eliot wrote one of my favorite of his poems about the event.  “Journey of the Magi” picks up some of the themes of other Eliot poems, especially the search for life and meaning in a barren wasteland.  In this case, the wasteland is cold and the journey is hard:

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.

Eliot sees us living in a world that is hard and materialistic and that resists wonder.  We may be seduced by its inducements, its summer palaces and its silken girls bringing sherbet, but ultimately they fail to satisfy.  Once we have seen the promise of a world filled with meaning, we are no longer at ease with how we have been living our lives.

But to open ourselves to mystery, we must break with dull routine, the water wheel beating the darkness.  And we must override the voices telling us that our dreams are folly.

I love the images in the second stanza, which seem matter of fact and yet hint at a deeper significance.  To nail them down too much is to violate them so just check out to see whether they delight your imagination. (When symbols become mechanistic equal signs, then literature becomes engineering.)  Do the three trees foreshadow the three crosses and the six hands dicing for silver foreshadow the Roman centurions throwing for Christ’s garments (or the silver payoff to Judas)?  Is the white horse Christ’s soul? How does a white horse running free in a field make you feel?

T. S. Eliot is one who has felt like an old man in a dry month (“Gerontion”) or a scarecrow (“The Hollow Men”).  In “The Wasteland” he hears the rattle of bones and sees fear in a handful of dust.  The journey of the magi represents for him a direction he can travel to restore vitality.

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