Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this addss. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Sunday
In a search for Feast of the Epiphany poems, I stumbled across this Godfrey Rust lyric. It’s the fourth of a four-poem sequence inspired by the story of the three wisemen, who are described as seekers after truth. The poem borrows from T.S. Eliot’s well-known “Journey of the Magi,” which ends,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
In Rust’s poem, the Magi discover love to be at the center of creation. Counterintuitively, its very vulnerability means that it cannot be bought, digitized, invested in, or otherwise appropriated:
The Epiphany
By Godfrey RustA stable’s a good place for revelations.
Some of the most profound discoveries
are made in back rooms, half by accident,
by people half-exhausted, looking for something else.
Just as we felt like giving up,
when the whole thing had become ridiculous
and had gone on much too long, and we were blaming
everybody else for our mistakes,
we came upon the unexpected answer
in the most unlikely place:
a speechless, thoughtless, helpless child
who just lay there, needing to be loved.
In this subversion of all natural things
was born the enabling power of sacrifice—
a being whose ambition was to seek
its own destruction, and then call upon
his followers to do no more or less.
What kind of way was this to rule a world?
He just lay there, needing to be loved.
It must be stopped: each Herod would conspire
to kill it when it cannot be tempted
with possessions or subdued with pain,
or lulled to sleep with alcohol or television.
Here was something we could not buy or cure,
digitize, transplant, upgrade, invest in,
analyze or write a business plan for.
He had no army, text-book, voters’ mandate
or computer markup language
with which to implement his great design:
he just lay there, needing to be loved.
It was the most implausible demand.
Anything else we might negotiate
but not this life of grace secured through death:
grace, born out of deprivation,
grace born of the endurance of the oppressed,
grace born of the hardships of the poor,
grace born of the forgiveness of the intolerable,
grace borne in the dignity of silence, grace born
from incomprehensible submission
to the absolute abuse of power.
In the strength of his weakness
he just lay there, needing to be loved.
Eons after energy exploded into matter
here in this stable was let loose
the yet more potent power of perfect love
Our gifts were tokens. There was nothing more to do
but leave the child to his own terrible story,
and return by different routes
to our own countries, strangers to us now,
yet seeing them as if for the first time,
how they just lie there, needing to be loved.
