Magi as Models
(1/8/23)
O Lover,
We recently celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany, the self-manifestation (“showcasing”) of Your Euangélion (“Good News”) to all the nations. The gospel reading was from Matthew (2:1-12) tracing the trek of Magi from regions east guided by an arresting astronomical phenomenon. The “exotic” dimension of the gospel reading was apparent: the trekkers clearly entered the drama from outside Hebrew geography and religiosity. Matthew portrays them as ignorant of Jewish texts. More than “wise men,” the Mass homilist on Epiphany focused primarily on Magi as “seekers,” as alert pilgrims on a quest. In this prayer I am pondering how this year this gospel reading was a kind of parable of my own spiritual passage to You.
Perhaps most basically, my relationship with You too has been a long and serpentine journey. Coming out of fundamentalist precincts where the decisive human “yes” to You was reduced to a formulaic moment, I have long since been taught by experience that a lifespan itself is too brief a duration for the full offering of that response. The way to You is, to borrow Paul McCartney’s line, “A Long and Winding Road.” Indeed, the Greater Life, because it unfolds within and of You, may be imaged in part as the eternal blossoming of that “yes” to the Télos which is You. Thus images of process such as “journey,” “voyage,” “trek.”
Then there is the star. While I have experienced my life as a “search,” one episodically characterizable as helter-skelter, as indiscriminate appetite for everything, it has not been sans guidance. Particularly in retrospect, I perceive my journey as response to Your drawing, Your wooing, the powerful “reverse gravity” of You Yourself who are Agápe (I Jn 4:8,16). Looking back, I am persuaded that I have been locked onto as if by a homing device. Overwhelming throughout the chaos, meandering, and retro-phases was Your stellar draw. As with an astronomical black hole, I suspect that neither I not any other of Your creatures could finally escape the white heat magnetism of Your Sacred Heart.
And then there is the fact that the spiritual trek is not without its obstacles, challenges, and dangers, these often finding expression in structural images involving religion and/or politics. One of the searing features of the Matthew text is that neither Jerusalem’s religious establishment, the cadre of insiders displaying indifference to say nothing of complicity, nor Rome’s political representative is alert to, or curious about, Your star. The only fruit of Herod’s seeking, for example, is unspeakable violence (2:16). The Magi seekers simply refuse to collaborate with, or be manipulated by, either party. In our present encounter with Christian nationalism, laced as it is with racism, anti-exotic sentiments, and openness to violence, sincere seekers’ alignment with Your star rather than the movers and shakers in “Jerusalem” is more important than ever. True seekers still scan the night skies so as to read the signs of the times beckoning us on into Your splendor.
And finally, both my own journey and that of the Magi have an additional commonality: breathtaking surprises! Who in the gospels’ infancy narratives, whether religious hierarchs or unwashed watchers of flocks, would have expected the chief heralds of the cosmic scale of Your Self-manifestation to be pagan gentiles, alien foreigners, eccentric astrologers? After all, we conventionally religious repeatedly attest to our knowledge of how and under what circumstances You break into our world: You are supposed to come to us within the contours of our expectations. In the face of that smug confidence, this text is oxymoronic, deconstructive, iconoclastic, discombobulating, scandalous. But then, what’s new? Your heílsgeschichte has always been rife with surprise, a characteristic which repeatedly spills over into the shaping of our individual spiritual journeys as well. O Lover, that my journey has not been devoid of that spillage leaves me mute and silent.
