EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 20

January 2000

A Winter Yet Warm

"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. "
- T.S. Eliot Journey of the Magi.

I expect anyone who has embarked on the spiritual journey inwards, which is the call of every human being, will recognize the terminology in the poem above, cold, long, deep, sharp and wintry. But without exception the people I have met who have been on this journey have come across to me as servants of the unseen and eternal powers and when I have been near to them it was easier for me to believe in God and in God's nearness to me.

Christmas, like Good Friday is no sentimental remembrance of something passed. Just as on Good Friday we embrace and kiss the cross- our cross and say yes to it as a means of personal redemption, so at Christmas we say yes to the journey this child will make and yes to his invitation to join him. On this journey there is little to distinguish between birth and death.
'...This Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us like Death, our death.'- T.S. Eliot

I have always enjoyed Christmas time and I have been easily able to connect the hype and razmataz, with the incarnation. I think that all human efforts to celebrate are significant and not to be condemned. We might get the emphasis a bit wrong sometimes but it's all an attempt to go beyond the ordinary and to reach out or to reach in to the divine. The society we live in leaves little room for celebration, we are all too busy with achievements and efficiency and looking good, and the bitter agony of death and birth to something more profound and spiritual often has no place in contemporary life.

The Millennium Dome seems to be a convenient hook for church people and others to condemn this emphasis on celebrating two thousand years of Christianity. The Spiritual Zone was the one that seemed to have the most difficulty finding sponsorship and funding, where as the Body Zone had no problems at all. In a way this should be a reminder and a jolt to the Church that this is where it is at. It should pose the question ' How, at the start of the third millenium, do we bring body and spirit together where they belong? It's easy to condemn human efforts at celebrating this event but it takes a lot more to offer a creative vision that can transform human attempts into something more profound, which might involve death to self and birth to love and generosity of lifestyle.

There will be no angels announcing the place where Christ is and no star to lead us their either, but the poor, the unloved, the homeless, the addicted, the excluded ones shout out to us where he can be found. It is encouraging that more and more people, especially amongst the young throughout the world, are responding to this. It's enlightening that someone like Cardinal Martini of Milan has such a profound vision for the Church in the millennium. Things are happening at many levels of Church life.

We as Church need to hear the voices of the poor and respond with a spirituality and a faith, a hope and a challenge that is credible. He who is the light of the world comes in darkness, the dead of winter: - 'lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not His'- G.M. Hopkins.
We need to look for him in our contemporary darkness wherever that is.

Like the Magi in T.S. Eliot's poem, we are reaching a point in the western world were we are tired and weary of materialism and the empty promises of individualism. At the end of their particular journey the Magi should come to a profound conclusion which I hope we can come to as well.
'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 shall be glad of another death.'- T.S. Eliot

Father John Michael Hanvey


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