Today's readings: Isaiah 60, 1-6; Ephesians 3, 2-3.5-6; Matthew 2, 1-12.
Today's Gospel story reminds me of T.S. Eliot's poem Journey of the Magi which, published in 1927 shortly after his baptism, reflects Eliot's state of mind in transition between his old and new faiths.
As Eliot says, we can no longer be at ease in the old dispensation. A seeking heart is never complacent. For wherever you are on your own spiritual journey, you have not fully arrived. We need always to go further, to take our own spiritual journey to another level.
Today's feast takes us to another level, opens up to a deeper level of understanding the Christmas story. It's a long journey home to come from the Bethlehem event to the invisible divine embrace in your life. The Magi readily undertook a wearisome, irksome, troublesome, dangerous, unseasonable journey to follow the star to the Christ child.
In his description of the future Jerusalem, Isaiah speaks of God's presence in the midst of his people, a presence so often overshadowed to the point of being invisible or even absent for many. The theme of nations and kings being attracted to the Lord is a central theme in Isaiah. It is a theme taken up by John in his Gospel when Jesus said: "When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to me."
But as Michael Jackson suggests in his book The Palm at the End of the Mind, "we need to approach religiosity without a theological vocabulary". For him, religion is a quest for "what matters", and a given interpretative vocabulary is at its most disputable when it appears to privilege one way of representing reality by depreciating others. He quotes extensively from his mother's private journal in the final years of her life, paying tribute to her resilience and unfailing hopefulness in the face of agonising rheumatoid arthritis. "That Emily (his mother) never invoked God, nor framed her existential struggle in religious terms, does not mean that her experience was essentially different from those for whom life's intelligibility and ultimate meaning are expressed through the language of a faith."
Today's journey of the Magi represents the journey of myriad peoples whose existential struggle or journey can ultimately bring them 'home' even if their baggage is not explicitly religious or their vocabulary theological.
In his address to the Roman Curia just before Christmas, Pope Benedict said that "even the people who describe themselves as agnostics or atheists must be very important to us as believers". The Pope thinks that the Church should also open today a sort of "court of the gentiles" for those alienated from religion, to keep the search for God alive in them. He uses the court for non-Jews in the Temple of Jerusalem as a symbol of the dialogue where people can cling to God in some manner, without knowing Him and before they have found the way to enter His mystery.
The birth of Jesus in Bethlehem makes the walls of Jerusalem collapse, and with them, the religious presumptions which made of Jerusalem and her people the point of reference of the messianic hopes. Jesus perturbed and threatened the powers that be in Jerusalem, as well as the chief priests and scribes, to the point that they plotted to kill him. The plot to kill God in our times is the result of people being dissatisfied with our gods, rites and myths.
In his book Divine Beauty, John O'Donohue writes that the human mind is in itself a world with huge mountains, deep valleys and forests of the unknown. But so often we turn the mystery and strangeness of this world into our private territory, making life predictable and making everything so familiar and normal that we actually succeed in forgetting how strange and wondrous it is to be here.
God's embrace makes us recognise something new, something that shows up the limitations we have accepted and our subtle but deadening compromises.