Epiphany: visiting with my neighbors

What is it about the creche?

The Census at Bethlehem, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

My neighbor across the street, a good friend in her 80’s, has all the coveted credentials of elite, Richmond society. But she also has a rich interior life that has taken her on journeys around the world, studying, praying and meditating with some of the world’s great spiritual masters. She’s wise, insightful, and deeply compassionate. She insists that she really knows very little, but all sorts of people find comfort in her presence and peace from wisdom. I call her the neighborhood therapist.

Recently, she invited me in for a visit, but we quickly realized that her small living room was so jammed with boxes and wrapping paper, representing an ecstasy of gift-giving fervor (especially for her grandchildren), that there was no place for us to sit. So, we postponed the visit. Several days later, even though her mobility is at times compromised, she came striding across the street to our house, laden with gifts for our children.

Later, when we finally got together in her restored living room, I admired her creche on the mantle. She responded, “I’ve given up having a Christmas tree. This is all I need. It means everything to me.”

Another neighbor and friend, an artist and art historian who lives an exceptionally simple but spiritually rich life, had us over for Christmas cheer the other night. I was drawn to her antique creche, a sprawling, Bruegelesque scene with many small peasant figurines representing all walks of life: a baker tending an oven with loaves of bread by her side, a butcher preparing meats, a shop keeper sweeping, an aproned blacksmith making horseshoes, children playing freely, animals of all sorts…, all of them engaged in the bustling everydayness of village life.

And off to the side, but still in the midst of it all, was the Holy Family with the baby Jesus lying in an animal’s feeding trough. You have to look carefully to find Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus, but the discovery is affecting. I commented on this and asked my neighbor about this creche. It was from Italy, she said, and had belonged to her aunt, who had been quite wealthy. When her aunt died, other members of the family eagerly claimed and divvied up significant sums of money and luxury properties. “But I,” she said quietly, with a gentle smile and sweet glint in her eye that conveyed a cherished secret few would understand, “…I got this,” almost as if I now knew the secret and mustn’t tell.

Today is the Day of the Epiphany, when the wise men arrive at the place of Jesus’ birth, but what is dominating the news is the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That’s understandable, since many are concerned that the American experiment in democracy could be nearing its end, with a more autocratic, Herod-like government in our future. But for now, I’m thinking more about my neighbors and their cherished creches; I’m pondering my own attraction to the creche; and I’ve been revisiting T.S. Eliot’s powerfully affecting poem, “Journey of the Magi”.

I hope you’ll read, sit with, and ponder Eliot’s poem for yourself. No need to try to analyze or figure out what the poem “really means.” Just let it work on you, perhaps allow it to leave you wondering. I admit that I can stew over theological ideas and concepts, but poetry often leads to an experience of wonder beyond concepts. The 4^thcentury saint, Gregory of Nyssa, says it best for me:

“Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.”

In a word, that is what T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi,” is doing for me.

The narrator of the poem is one of the magi from the story in Matthew’s Gospel. Magi were priests of Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion of Persia, now Western Iran. Some scholars believe that the concept of angels made its way into the Hebrew Bible from Zoroastrianism – Jews in exile among Zoroastrians learned of angels as benevolent beings, messengers sent from the Divine, and they brought this idea back with them when they returned from exile. Magi would be practitioners of astrology/astronomy, alchemy, and other esoteric forms of knowledge. Our word magic comes from the same root.

The narrator of the poem begins by noting that this journey to the infant Jesus, like all spiritual journeys, was full of hardship:

“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.

He remembers “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”.

At times, the magi, who were accustomed to a comfortable life, wondered if this journey was “all folly.” They thought about what they had left behind to make the journey, “The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, / And the silken girls bringing sherbet.”  And upon arriving at their destination, the narrator says only, “it was (you may say) satisfactory.” How strange; one senses that the place of Jesus’ birth was a little disappointing.

But we can imagine the long journey home, as well, time for assimilating what they have experienced, something they haven’t fully understood. And it is the final stanza that leaves me in a place of wonder, and maybe even feeling “disturbed”:

    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.

They’ve returned to their comfortable lives and their kingdoms, but they are no longer at home in their old lives, among their own people who are now “an alien people clutching their gods.” And the haunting conclusion, “I should be glad of another death.”

For many of us, the birth of Jesus is supposed to signal unmitigated joy and blissful peace.  But on December 26 at the gym, a couple of women expressed another common sentiment. “Christmas is over,” one of them insisted, with exasperation. “It’s time to get rid of the tree, the wreath, everything, and get back to normal. It’s over!”

This is the opposite of what Eliot’s magi feel. It’s almost as if they’re haunted, and there’s no going back to normal now, no way to feel at home in our former lives. This birth was also a death for them. And if you feel a little depressed or out of sorts at this time of year, it might be in part because of a magi-like recognition and longing in your soul, a feeling worth welcoming. “For God alone my soul in silence waits” (Psalm 62:1)

Here and there, I meet people who know all about the paradox of Christmas as both birth and death: my neighbor across the street (the neighborhood therapist) who couldn’t care less about her coveted social and educational credentials, and who lovingly welcomes all walks of life into her living room every week; and my neighbor next door, whose spiritual wealth is symbolized in her simplicity of life and her cherished inheritance – an unwanted, Bruegelesque scene with a secret you have to look for. She couldn’t care less about the expensive luxuries others claimed from her aunt’s estate.

I sense that at some point in their journeys, each of my neighbors must have reached a point where they were

no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

And I don’t know, but I strongly suspect, that their journeys (like all of ours) have been long and difficult, full of hardship. And I suspect their journeys involved a death. But that glint is evidence, and leaves no doubt, there was most certainly a birth.