Feast of the Epiphany - Homily 9

Homily 9 - 2017

The visit of the Magi does not figure in the mysteries of the Rosary – yet it may still be difficult to approach it with a sense of freshness and openness to discovery. But let us try. In fact, let us try to use it in our prayer, in the genuine hope that God might touch us anew and nourish us through its message.

St Ignatius of Loyola suggested a way of praying the Gospels by using our imaginations. That frees us from the worry of whether we are doing it right, whether we need to have studied the Gospels beforehand and know what the Gospel author is about. There is place for that, but not necessarily or always in our prayer. We do not need to ask whether we are dealing with actual history or with a story composed under the influence of God’s Spirit. We just use it as we choose, now, and see where we go.

In our journey this evening we can take the Gospel story as read and already familiar. Instead, I shall use a poem written by an English poet, TS Eliot. Eliot used his imagination – to engage with the scene. He put himself in the shoes of one of the Magi, picturing him back home in whatever country he came from, an old man by now, and ruminating over the event that happened many years before.

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, sorefooted, 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.

You get the idea – highly imaginative, yet engaging our attention.

I shall skip the poem’s second verse where, like Matthew before him, the poet introduced his own symbolism to stimulate the minds of us his readers.

The poem’s third verse outlined the questions stirred in Eliot’s heart and mind by his ruminating over the story. Again, he put these personal reflections in the mouth of the old Magus, the wise man.

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.

If in our prayer we let our imaginations wander creatively, they generally do get us thinking and wondering against the background of our own lives now. They give opportunity to God’s Spirit to stir. They set us up to engage, as it were, with God. They may even lead us to want to sit silently with mystery.