I like to think that T.S. Eliot knew something about me, about the ways in which my encounters with God, and faith, have often left me dissatisfied and restless.  Of course he died before I was born, but I think he understood my kind of believer.  It’s all right there in “The Journey of the Magi,” after all.  A belief that’s uncertain, questing, and having to put up with all the discomforts of the journey.  And then, at the end of the journey, encounters something unexpected, and feels both amazed and confused.  A belief that returns home and can’t find comfort in the old life anymore, but doesn’t really have a sense of what the new life truly is.  I think, on this cold winter’s day, that I am one of the magi, and that I’m not alone in that.

The magi in his poem spend a lot of time describing the journey itself.  They’re wise, they see how the things they observe – hands dicing, “three trees on the low sky” – are symbolic, how they predict something mysterious and meaningful, in the future.  Human beings are meaning-makers, and I sometimes think that the main job of the church is to help people make meaning.  But lately the symbols point to some future meaning, to something that I don’t think has happened yet, and all I can do is nod and say, “yes, that is symbolic,” without being able to say what the symbol is for.

And then, when they finally get to Bethlehem, their response to the babe in the manger is strangely cold – “it was (you might say) satisfactory.”  Eliot seems to think that they really weren’t expecting it, and the very strangeness of it made it hard for them to be all that joyful.  In his poem, the Nativity is a weird, disjointed thing.  All it’s usual meanings, the cosy sense given to it by children’s plays and Christmas carols, haven’t been assigned yet.  What they see is a baby laying on a cow’s dinner plate.

But still, it changes everything for them.  They return home but find themselves foreigners in their own countries, and they’re “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/with an alien people clutching their gods.”  But what has changed for them?  What does it mean, that scene in Bethlehem?

I feel like we’re living in the age of the magi, when the old dispensations seem alien and strange, but the new dispensation – whatever will happen next to the church and to humanity – hasn’t fully been established yet.  To make meaning of it is impossible, because there aren’t enough words on the page, not enough lines in the play, not enough lyrics in the song.  All we have is a half sung tune that we know is important, perhaps the most important thing of all.  But we can’t understand it’s importance until it’s all the way sung.  And in the meantime, we have discomfort and confusion.  “This birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”

Here’s the full poem:

The Journey Of The Magi
by T.S. Eliot

‘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.
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.

In this special edition of Word and Table, Karl interviews Ruben Herrera about the interrelation between community organizing and the church.  Ruben has long been a force in Columbus, building a diverse community of activists who work on diverse issues.  Most recently he’s been involved in the effort to get Wendy’s to sign on to the Fair Food Program.  You can listen to the podcast here or by subscribing through the iTunes store.

Program note – we will be taking the holidays off, and resume broadcasting after January 1st.

Americans don’t trust each other.  That’s the main finding of the General Social Survey, which has been tracking all sorts of things for forty years.  You can read about it on the Huffington Post.  What struck me most was that almost two thirds of respondents said that you can’t be too careful in your interactions with other people, the highest level of distrust ever, but only for the white majority, which is skewing the results.  As the Huff Po article makes clear, African American people have been distrustful for a long time.  Does this mean that trust is a result of economic and racial privilege?  I never really thought of trust as a privilege before, and now that I am I find my mind divided.  On the one hand, I think it’s good for people to surrender some of their privilege on behalf of others, and to experience what life is like for the rest of America.  On the other hand, I don’t think that justice is really served by us all just becoming miserable.  Wouldn’t it be better if the trend was for trust to increase across the board, and for minorities to begin to feel the economic and social security that would allow them to trust like the majority?  Instead the opposite is happening, and I wonder if the church has any role to play in rebuilding neighborliness.

Most of our churches abandoned trust long ago.  Buildings are locked most of the time, and the idea that a church could provide a place for quiet contemplation or sanctuary for those walking in off the street is complicated by our fear of theft or other dark deeds.  But what if our solution wasn’t to lock the doors, but to try to increase the use of our buildings, to make sure that people were always around who could keep an eye on things?  Imagine a church that had three different groups meeting at once, most or all of them outsiders to the actual congregation.  They would have the opportunity to exchange ideas with each other, and to teach church people about their dreams and ideas.  And they would keep the buildings safe.

One of the culprits that’s constantly sited for our decline in trust is our lack of a public forum.  There is no central meeting place where Americans gather.  Could this be the new mission of the church, especially churches like ours, that have big, crumbling buildings?  Could we become the tide that rises all boats, all people towards a greater sense of trust in one another?