When
I was a little boy, the most exciting day of the year for us kids was January 6th.
Only in church was it called by the strange Greek name of ‘Epiphany’; to us it was
the feast of the ‘Three Magi Kings’—los
Tres Reyes Magos, as we called them. It
was the year’s big day of presents. These were brought to us in Cuba not by
Santa Claus, that unknown Nordic figure, but by the very same biblical
characters that brought gifts for Jesus. ¿Qué
te trajeron los Reyes? was the incessant question friends would ask one
another in the following days, eager to compare the bounty: What did the Kings bring you? On the eve
of the feast, I would be bursting with hope and expectation. On one such occasion
(I must have been around 8), something extraordinary happened to me. I was in
the restroom preparing to go to bed. When I turned off the light I happened to
look up at the window. What I saw stunned me. Plain as could be, I saw the star
of Bethlehem shining in the night sky exactly as portrayed on Christmas cards:
an intense point of light in the center, and then four beams radiating from it,
with the bottom beam extending downward, far into the earth where I was. I
couldn’t believe that the star of Jesus had come to shine just for me exactly as it had for the Magi Kings of old!
That
night, light of Christ’s glorious Appearing pierced my expectant heart, and I
have never recovered from that piercing. You might say that ever since that
night I have been chronically afflicted by a sense of awe before the mysteries
of the Christian faith, which for me throb with a life of their own and are
always on the verge of bursting forth visibly through the barrier of the
ordinary. As a fulfillment of a deeper, embryonic desire, the grace I received
that night outshone even my childish greediness for material gifts. Nor did the
magic of the effect disappear even after it had been patiently explained to me by
smiling parents that any point of light, seen through the refraction of a metallic screen, will produce the same
cruciform phenomenon. I didn’t care; I had seen what I had seen and felt what I
had felt, and the awe infused into my soul was palpable and abiding.
I
sometimes wonder whether my faith-convictions as an adult ought not to be
attributed more to this moment when I saw my
star of Bethlehem than to the many books of theology I have since read. Many
decades later I experienced another starry visitation. One January morning in
San Francisco (I was already well into my 50s), I sat at my desk by a second-story
window. I was anxious, busy painstakingly discerning whether I should leave the
university and enter this monastery. I happened to glance down into the street
feeling quite distraught. The Christmas season was only just over. And what did
I suddenly see? Hanging from a tree growing kitty-corner from where I was sitting
and swaying forlornly in the wind as if winking at me, I glimpsed a large
cardboard silver star that someone
had tied by a long string to that particular branch, right in line with my line
of vision. Why on earth a star offered to
my sight in mid-January, attached to a tree that was definitely not a Christmas
tree and had no other ornaments? Once again, my heart was pierced by the
light of Jesus’ Bethlehem star, and on the spot my mind was made up to become a
monk and leave behind my own ‘Persia’, the fabled City-on-the-Bay.
Brothers
and sisters: All of our Christmas and Epiphany texts explode with the splendor of
this same supernatural Light, which is always hunting us down; and this is
little wonder since Christ is the radiance of
the glory of God (Heb 1:3). With the flashing appearance of Jesus in the
horizon of our world, God’s goodness and mercy have burst into the darkness of
our woeful planet and of our distressed hearts. St John affirms very simply that
God is light (1 Jn 1:5), and this
proclamation is of a piece with his other definition of the Divine Being: God is love (4:6). Again, in the prologue
to his Gospel, John affirms of the Word Incarnate that in him was life, and the life was the light of men (1:4). Indeed,
if we rise to the occasion, if we admit into the inmost recesses of our hearts
the explosive, luminous, and yet utterly hidden and ever so quiet Event we have
celebrated this season, we will find our souls enraptured as they soar across a
light-drenched landscape of awe and joy. We will not be saved until we are pierced by the Light of Christ.
Jesus
is presented to us by the Gospel as the still-center of the narrative, and
indeed of the whole universe, even those parts of it beyond the reach of even
the $10-billion Webb Telescope. He draws all to himself by the sheer power of
his bright, humble Presence. When the Magi arrive in Bethlehem and adore the
Lord, we are witnessing in them all the nations of the world acclaiming the
Jewish Messiah as their Savior, too. This is the dramatic manifestation of the
great Mystery revealed to St Paul: namely, that the Gentiles [no
less than the Jews] now have the same inheritance and form the same Body and
enjoy the same promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel (Eph 3:6). What
ultimately counts here is not racial and religious privilege and tradition, or
a superior intellectual culture, or impressive personal achievements and
talents, but rather the single-minded capacity and willingness of the human
heart to believe, obey and conceive the Word of God in union with our
Blessed Lady, the Mother of God.
The
act of beholding with awe, wonderment and glad surrender the supernatural Light
manifested at Jesus’ birth, thoroughly transfigures those who gaze at it and
welcome it. The light of Jesus is a transforming energy, as St Paul declares to
the Corinthians: For God, who said,
‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of
the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 4:6). And we all, with unveiled face, beholding
the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one
degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit
(2 Cor 3:18). Both the Enlightener and the enlightened together exult in the
one Divine Light. We may say that this Trinitarian Light takes the
Magi up into itself and fills them with the very joy that gladdens the Heart of
God: When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with
great joy. Yes, it is a law of theological aesthetics that we become what
we contemplate! We metamorphose into what we behold with love and adoration because the one contemplating allows himself to be penetrated and changed to
the core by the power of the energetic beauty of Christ the Lord. Let us, then,
be careful about what we adore….
The
Magi do not receive such an extraordinary participation in the Light of God
passively; they embrace it actively; they literally ‘hitch their lives to that
star’, which is not a generic luminary but specifically his star, that is, the star pointing out the presence of the King
they were seeking; and with intelligent docility they follow its movement
wherever it may take them. They then undertake a long and hazardous but dynamic
journey, with a clear goal in mind; they engage all their powers of analysis
and research and do astral calculations; they delve meticulously into Jewish
history and prophecy and royal lineage; and, perhaps more impressively than
everything else, they lay aside all Persian ethnocentric pride and cultural
prejudices in order to find the newborn
King of the Jews, a people wholly alien to them. But what have they
to object if the eternal God chose to enter the world by the backwater of Judea
rather than the splendor of Persia? Indeed, such a reversal of mere human
expectations already announces divine mystery unfolding.
All
of the Magi’s efforts, all of their courage and risk-taking, all of their
expanding of mental boundaries, have had but one goal: to finally satisfy the
hunger of their human hearts to adore the
true God, to bask in the presence of divine glory and be transformed by its
rays. All of the Magi’s purpose and determination is contained in the simple
words of Matthew’s text: On entering the
house they saw the Child with Mary his mother. And falling forward, they
worshipped him. These verbs describe a headlong physical momentum that
manifests the worshippers’ desire almost to
fall into the Child. Such a surprising and even abnormal impulse does make
perfect sense, however, once we come to see that this Child is the active embodiment
of God’s glory, and that he comes to quench the deepest hunger of human beings:
namely, the yearning to be sated with the glory of God. The poet William
Everson has graphically portrayed the inner force of faith driving the Magi in
this way:
And they brought their camels
Breakneck into that village,
And flung themselves down in the dung and dirt of that place,
And kissed that ground, and the tears
Ran on their faces, where the rain had.
After falling on the ground, [the Magi] opened their treasures to him: that is, they unsealed the depths of their persons in order to surrender their whole being to the divine King as a sacrificial offering due only to God. I dare say they did not return to their own country unchanged. Indeed, the text says that they returned to Persia by another way, and I don’t think this means only that they took a different road back…. Nor should we today leave from this Eucharist unchanged. Why not offer all our lives here and now, just as they are, the beautiful with the shameful, to the Infant King, our Emmanuel? After all, he, the eternal Word, has long known our darkness and yet has unaccountably been attracted to us by that very knowledge, has anyhow bounded down from heaven with great energy and joy, looking to make his pillow out of our misery.