From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

I hope that you have had a good twelve days of Christmas. As tomorrow is the Epiphany, I want to share my favorite poem about that feast and the journey it marks. It is by T.S. Eliot and is, I think, an extraordinary imagining of not just the journey but of the mark that journey leaves on the believing soul. It is evocative, challenging, and poignant and I hope you find it as meaningful in this time of year as I always do.

Journey of the Magi
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri and raised a Unitarian. After attending Harvard he went to Oxford in 1914 to work on a doctorate in philosophy. After his marriage in 1916 he had many personal difficulties which resulted in poems such as The Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925). 

By the late twenties he was an Anglican, a UK citizen, and a monarchist.

For many he may be best known for having written the book of light poetry which became the libretto for the musical Cats. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. This poem was written in 1927, a year after Eliot had converted to Christianity and had been baptized into the Church of England.

The first lines echo a well known sermon by Lancelot Andrewes.

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 when 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 dirty 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.

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 wineskins.
But there was no information, and 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 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.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert