I wrote this for the Christmas issue of Christian History magazine. I wish it didn’t feel so relevant today. Peace to us all.
A Cold Coming We Had of It
When I was a child, my favorite holiday ritual was to help my mother decorate our house for Christmas. We’d haul up boxes of decorations from the basement, unwrap the felt and clothespin ornaments we’d made in years past, untangle the tree lights, and set to the work of decking our halls.
When all the other boxes were emptied and the house made festive, my mother would hand me a final cardboard box that held our nativity set, one she bought at Woolworth’s in 1963. I would spend the better part of an evening creating an elaborate drama on top of the buffet in the dining room—the shepherds were camped out on one end, minding their sheep with no idea that in a matter of weeks their lives would be upended. Mary and Joseph and their donkey began their journey at the other end, making daily progress toward the moss-covered shack at the center of the tableau. Baby Jesus had to wait out most of December in a drawer, making his dramatic appearance just before we went to bed on Christmas Eve.
But my favorite part of the whole set was the wise men. Being very concerned with historical accuracy, I settled the three kings and their camel on a bookshelf on the eastern corner of the room where they had to bide their time until word came for them to head toward the action on the buffet. Then, day-by-day, I would move them slowly across the vast expanse of the living room, carrying them over the couch mountains, through the coffee table valley, across the open desert of the gold shag carpet until, on January 6th, they arrived at the cradle with their arms full of strange gifts, their solemn faces never giving over to the strain of the journey they’d just completed.
That journey was far more interesting to me than the travels of dear pregnant Mary and her weary husband. These were great men who had been sent out by their crazed king for a vague purpose–asked to travel for weeks, maybe even months, to spy on a baby.
So imagine my joy when, as an adult, I happened to hear a Christmas radio broadcast of Bruce Cockburn, Roseanne Cash, and Lou Reed performing a strange, haunting poem about these same haggard kings. The poem, it turns out, was “Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), published in 1930 as part of his Ariel Poems.
‘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, sorefooted, 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 arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might 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.
The poem, written shortly after Eliot’s 1927 conversion to Christianity, is about far more than the Magi themselves. Literary types read it as the story of Eliot’s conversion, the often-brutal journey into faith.
Like so much in the Christmas narrative, the arrival of the wise men has been romanticized in our telling of the story. Our versions tend to focus on their arrival at the manger, their gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh, their brave decision to rebel against Herod (Matthew 2:1-12). We see them as a sign that even earthly rulers are humbled before the throne of the newborn king.
But Eliot suggests a far different reading of the Magi. There is little triumph, little nobility in his narrative. Instead, it is grim, earthy, crude. There is doubt. There is complaining. There is despair.
When Eliot wrote this poem, not only was he a fairly new Christian, he was also in the throes of a difficult, disintegrating marriage. Coming to the faith at mid-life, Eliot’s conversion was not a simple matter of belief out of unbelief, but of a long, slow, clearly painful process of letting go of one life and clinging desperately to another.
Like the Magi, the new convert travels out of one country into a sometimes dark, dank, unfamiliar place where the natives are not always kind, the sleep often restless, the mission undefined. Is it a birth or a death? “I had seen birth and death,” he writes, “But had thought they were different; this Birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”
My childhood dramatic inclinations not withstanding, there is, for me, something deeply compelling about the bitterness of Eliot’s telling of the story. Through Eliot’s words, we are invited into a different telling of the Christmas story, one in which the reframing of the world, the mixing of kingdoms ushered in by the Incarnation, brings as much pain and struggle as it brings joy and peace. In the midst of this tension, we, like the Magi, find ourselves lost and bitter even as we take another step onward, slowly letting go of the darkness and clinging to the light.
Carla Says 