After the dramatic sermon on Sunday night based on Matthew 2:1-12, what better way to keep thinking about the passage than to reflect on TS Eliot's famous poem about the magi? Do you think his cool, emo ending is a good expression of the Christian experience?
The Journey of the Magi by TS Eliot
"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 gong 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 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 lead all that way forBirth or Death?
There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.
I have 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.
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3 comments:
Is it a good expression? I think it's one of many facets of the Christian experience, and deserves attention, but without forgetting that there's a lot of joy and hope too.
The key word you've used is 'ending'. The emo bitterness is there, true, but it's clearly not the ending, as you can tell by the Magi's looking forward to the next death. So I think we as Christians can relate to the bitterness, because like the Magi, we've encountered Jesus, worshipped him and been taken up by the excitement of understanding God's most amazing act in history, but have now come down from this euphoria into the task of living in a fallen Australia full of people "clutching their gods" who just don't care to listen to our experience of the risen Lord.
Sometimes I'm more bitter about it than at other times.
...in the room the women come and go talking of michaelangelo...
Time for an update, Appa!
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