Calvin College






Special Reports

 

Journey of the Magi

“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 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, 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 led all the 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.

-T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot served as a fire-watcher during the blitz-bombing of London in WWII. He would stand on the roof of a tall building, and as the bombs came down he would radio out the locations of damage. It was from this terrible vantage that he penned parts of his most complexly beautiful poetry. He was troubled by his circumstances: “How can I scribble out rhythms of words while London burns?” But the bombs kept falling, and the words kept coming. Often the deepest beauty exists in the face of terrible ugliness.

“Journey of the Magi” is the story of Eliot’s journey to faith. Contemporaries such as Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemmingway mocked Eliot’s conversion to Christianity, saying he had “gone over to the ignorant.” These are the ways deep and weather sharp, the voices saying this was all folly. But the hardships that deter us are these haunting images of human suffering. For many people in the world these pictures represent the reality of life. So we wade through it all towards Christmas, or faith, and all that awaits us is a hard and bitter agony—the death of the old self. Christ’s birth necessitates this. We must recognize that upon finding Christ, like Eliot, like the Magi, we will never be the same again. Our faith should no longer be at ease in the old dispensations. Christmas is a time when we should be very uncomfortable in the world. But Christians have a unique perspective from which to experience the holidays, a joy that exceeds the suffering. The juxtaposition between human suffering and Christ’s power to transcend it is much like the one between the bombing of London and Eliot’s poetry. Often the deepest beauty exists in the face of terrible ugliness.