Epiphany

It might have been just someone else’s story,
Some chosen people get a special king.
We leave them to their own peculiar glory,
We don’t belong, it doesn’t mean a thing.
But when these three arrive they bring us with them,
Gentiles like us, their wisdom might be ours;
A steady step that finds an inner rhythm,
A  pilgrim’s eye that sees beyond the stars.
They did not know his name but still they sought him,
They came from otherwhere but still they found;
In temples they found those who sold and bought him,
But in the filthy stable, hallowed ground.
Their courage gives our questing hearts a voice
To seek, to find, to worship, to rejoice.

Malcolm Guite’s first sonnet for Epiphany. Malcolm explains the background to the composition of the sonnet on his blog.

Epiphany: Journey of the Magi

I quoted some T S Eliot over Christmas and thought I’d let him speak for himself at Epiphany. This is a recording of Eliot reading his Ariel poem Journey of the Magi. The poem was written after Eliot’s conversion to Christianity and confirmation in 1927.

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the 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 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 wine-skins,
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.

Epiphany by the Queen of Vampires

One of my Christmas reads was The Road To Cana by Anne Rice, the author best known for her vampire and occult novels. This is the second book in her Christ The Lord series; a fictional novel continuing Rice’s exploration of the life of Jesus and covering the period leading up to his emergence into public ministry at the age of 30, culminating in the miracle of the wedding at Cana. An unusual feature of the series is that it is written in the first person, however, this allows Rice to explore the inner tensions that must have confronted Jesus as he came to terms with his calling and ministry. Jesus wrestles with the possibility of marriage, family tensions, the challenge to take up military opposition to Roman occupation and the other demands of messianic expectation.

The themes of The Road To Cana are not dissimilar to those explored in Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, though this book is more traditional and orthodox in its theology. Incarnation, vocation and revelation are at the heart of the narrative and Rice captures the humanity of Jesus as he confronts the evils of zealotry, bigotry, cruelty and the temptations of Satan in the wilderness following his baptism. The story is an epiphany as Jesus comes to a full realisation of his mission and his true nature, hinted at throughout his life, is revealed to family, friends and the wider community.

From vampires to Christ is my more detailed post about the Christ The Lord series and Anne Rice’s faith and Jonathan Evens has also written an interesting piece about The Road to Cana. I understand that Rice plans two more books in the series and one of the interesting questions Jonathan raises is how Rice will handle the more familiar material from the four gospels. The Road to Cana suggests she will handle the material with sensitivity, imagination and considerable theological insight.