Three Wise Kings, Atlas Catalàn, 1375, Fol. V.
From observation to movement
How ruthlessly T S Eliot debunks the sanitised, sparkly, Hallmark Christmas card version of the journey of the magi - the three kings or wise men as they are sometimes known in the various translations of the Gospels. His poem ‘The journey of the magi’ (it’s a beautiful poem and worth reading, extract included) paints a vivid picture of the perils and privations of the journey they undertook in following the star to they knew not what or where.
What motivated them? The shepherds in the nativity stories had a clearer and much more spectacular intervention directing them towards a hazardous birth in squalid circumstances. The prompt for the magi was much more ambiguous: they saw something in the night sky, something bright they hadn’t noticed before which gave the appearance of moving. I imagine them watching this new phenomenon over a number of nights along with their astronomers and sages. What might have merely passed as a transient enigma in the heavens became, I imagine, an object of great curiosity, something which confounded their learned, educated minds.
Who knows the steps between their observations, enquiries and disputations and heading off into the unknown on their truculent camels. I’m inclined to believe that curiosity played a large part in their movement from observation to movement, from passivity to action. Incurious minds and hearts would have stayed in the comfort of home, with what was known and safe.
I imagine, like pilgrims the world over and through the ages, they knew there was a risk that they would never return from their quest. The opportunities for misadventure to overtake them must have been many. And yet they went.
safety and Fulfilment
Courage? Folly? Misguided adventurism? No, I find them beguiling figures because they allowed their curiosity about where (and to what) this star might lead to be their guide, notwithstanding the possible cost. And notwithstanding the people of their households thinking this was all madness. Mary Oliver’s poem ‘The journey’ names some of the forces that keep us where we are:
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice
- though the whole house began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
These three travellers of old, pilgrims on an uncertain path, ask me to reflect on what it is I allow to keep me safe but perhaps unfulfilled, to stay with what I know rather than what is calling me. They invite me to look - with self-compassion but a clear eye - at what keeps me comfortable and in the safety of what is expected of me.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the leading Jewish theologians and philosophers of the 20th century wrote, "Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.”
Questions
In this advent season, what is calling you to a pilgrimage of the heart? What is inviting you to relinquish the grip you have on whatever has become a shrine for you? Are there stirrings of longing or feelings of dissatisfaction that are promptings of the Spirit ushering you into a new season? If so, please allow them, give them permission to be in your life, bring curiosity to them, let them grow and bear fruit. Who knows where they will lead.
Gus MacLeod
“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.”