20 C+M+B 25
The Magi Recall The Star
Matthew 2
Epiphanies always have consequences.
Apocalypses always require assembly.
A star. A distant pin-prick—maybe
light from an ancient orb gone supernova?—
portends the end of something, and the birth
of something new. But what? Or who?
Why should this punctuation in the dark
become the instigation for the journey?
The journey. Set your foot to paths uncharted
impelled to some uncertain destination,
ask inconvenient questions of those whose power
disinclines them to acknowledge answers,
barter time from old, bloodthirsty fools
who sit on queasy thrones and dread the star.
The star. It moves, yet night to night the same
point of light in the aching windswept darkness,
the cold black emptiness of space.
Like you, it makes its own strange journey,
setting sail to catch the breath of God.
It finds its destination in those eyes.
Those eyes. The child sees you, and calls your name—
a name you had forgot, or did not know
you knew, a name whose riches, undeserved,
will cost you everything you have, and more.
He looks at you, and in his eyes you see
the rising and the setting of your hopes.
Your hopes. Leave them behind, these selves you carry
the journey long, like treasures of the heart;
return, then, empty-handed, knowing nothing
but the light behind the dark eyes of the child.
Be haunted by that light. It does not fade
even as the star returns to darkness.
Darkness falls. You are night-blind, and groping.
Go home a different way, if home at all.
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Encounters with the Holy change everything. They reverse the polarities of existence. They cost you everything, and even everything is not enough. They drain you of yourself and replace you with another Self you did not ask for and do not understand. They require you to die in order to live. “Yet not I who live,” writes Paul, who met the Holy on the Damascus Road, “but Christ who lives in me.”
Jesus, says Mark, met a demon-possessed man near Gerasa in the Transjordan. When Jesus exorcised them, the demons “begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.” Why do demons want to stay home? Do they crave domesticity, fear the uncertainty of wandering and wildness? Are the comforts of home antithetical to the coming of the Holy? And is that why those possessed by the Holy so often find themselves pilgrims and wanderers? From Cain to Abraham to the magi to Jesus to the desert fathers, they fling themselves out into ferocious landscapes to seek the Holy in places where life and death are inconsequential matters. Does the Holy drain away who you are so Something or Someone else can fill you instead, possess and mold you, make of you something you never intended to be? Does “home” cease to be home anymore, so that going home is but another journey into a far country? 1
1 This poem of mine, along with the accompanying commentary printed here, first appeared in Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Fall 2022. I subsequently included it, in edited form, in my volume, The Longing: Poems (Eugene OR: Resource Publications, 2024).
Shape and Substance 