The feast day of Charles I, on the anniversary of his execution, is 30 January. Chalcedon and Jess (who is much missed) have written posts about this topic (see here and here, among others). For my part, I note that the observance was removed from the Book of Common Prayer in 1859.

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The entry in the Book of Common Prayer for the conversion of Saint Paul can be found here. The readings are Acts 9:1-22 and Matthew 19:27-end.

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“A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and especially a long journey in. The ways deep, rhe weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off in the ‘very deal of winter’ … the these are the difficulties they overcame of a wearisome, riksome, troublesome, dangerous, unseasonable journey; and for all this they came”

Lancelot Andrewes, sermon for Christmas Day, 1622

“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.”

Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi was written in 1927, and those first lines are straight from Andrewe’s sermon. For both men that journey was a parable of our own journey to Christ. We are, as Andrewes commented, always coming: “To Christ we cannot travel travel, but weather and way and all must be fair.”

Eliot and Andrewes capture something easily missed in our tendency to sentimentalise the Nativity; the cost of discipleship. Often, maybe too often, we write as though being a Christian is a matter of coming from unbelief to belief, and liking, as we all do, a happy ending to the story, perhaps we are happy to collude, albeit unconsciously, in such a narrative. The Magi, whose coming we celebrate at the Epiphany remind us of a different – and more difficult story.

Once, and still among those locked into an older (but self-consciously ‘modern’) reading of Scripture, it was the fashion (and doubtless still is) to cast doubt upon the story and to read it as a symbol or a sign. But it is clear that the tradition goes back a long way, and a study of the Church Fathers and of the Suriac tradition, gives us no ground for that late nineteenth, mid-twentieth century pride that somehow the “moderns” knew best. Which is not to say that the way the story is commonly portrayed is accurate, either.

Because there were three gifts, we tend, as the icon pictured above does, to assume there were three Magi. Andrewes inherited the tradition, dating back as far as Justin Martyr, that they were from what is now modern Jordan, from Petra. Justin saw them as fuflfilling the Old Testament prophecies about the coming of the Messiah, and he saw in the three youths in the fiery furnace in Daniel 3, a foreshadowing of them. As the Psalmist (Psalm 72) said: “Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall serve him.” Origen, citing Numbers 24:17  saw them (hence Andrewes taking the same view) as fulfilling the prophecy of Balaam” “there shall come a Star out of Jacob.”

The evidence suggests that the Early Church attached huge importance to the story of these visitors “from the East;” it is not hard to see why.

Christ came to save the lost sheep, and the evidence that the first Christians assumed that these were the Jews is abundant. Mark quotes Jesus as saying to the Syro-Phonecian woman:

Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s

bread and throw it to the dogs

Despite a lamentable contemporary tendency to read our obessions into it (the idea that Jesus was a racist is dealt with admirable by Dr Ian Paul here), this is another sign of how St Mark shows us that while Our Lord’s mission began with the Jews, it was not confined to them. The Magi serve a similar purpose.

The story of the Magi is significant because of what is tells us, not only about the Magi, but about the Jews.

Wherever the Magi originated – and there is an ancient Syriac text, The Revelation of the Magi which identifies them as being from the land of Shir – they were not Jews. Whether they were “Persians”, or from Petra (and the two are not incompatible), or whether they were descandants of Adam’s third son Seth, they were not among the Chosen People. When Herod consults the Jewish wise men, their system, their logic, their wisdom have nothing to tell him. They believe in a Messiah, but the idea of him being born outside a royal palace has not occurred to them. They are ignorant of him, and will for the most pasrt remain so. Herod is anxious, but they have nothing to tell him.

The Magi, on the other hand, with no Scripture to guide them, and no tradition of a Messiah, show themselves open to whatever God is doing. They do not know the way, but the star guides them; the way is hard; but they take it.

In a theological system that consigned outsiders to eternal condemnation, and where a Samaritan woman could express amazement that a Jew would speak to her, Matthew shows us, as Jesus does, how the Incarnation broke down the dividing wall between cultures. As Paul told the Colossians:

Here there cannot be Greek and circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian and Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all

Col. 3:11

But there was, and is, a cost. Like the Magi, the Christian travels a long aand a hard road. And we might, with Eliot’s Magus, wonder iss 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.” Dying to the old Adam is not easy. In Andrewe’s words:

With them it was but ‘we have seen’, ‘we are come’; with us it would have been ‘but we are coming’ at most. Our fashion is to see and see again, before we stir a foot, specially if it be to the worship of Christ. Come such a journey at such a time? No; but fairly have put it off to the spring of the year …

Andrewes, Christmas Day 1622

Then of course, it will be easier. But maybe even easier in the summer?

They came, and thanks to God, so can we. But will we?

From quiet homes and first beginning,

out to the undiscovered ends,

there’s nothing worth the wear of winning,

but laughter and the love of friends

Hilaire Belloc

One of things about retiring is that it tends to invite something which life’s busy routine denies – that is reflection.

The last eighteen months have been traumatic for so many in so many ways, that it seems almost callous to suggest that it might have had any benefits, but from my own personal point of view it has aided that process of reflection. When the first “lockdown” commenced in March 2020 it meant that after four years of living away from home for at least half the year, I was confined, as it were to barracks. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology and Zoom, it was possible to continue doing my job for St Mary’s from my own study at home. The loss of that “laughter and the love of friends” was a downside, as was not seeing the students and our beautiful campus at Strawberry Hill. I also missed my walks down the Thames path to Richmond and back to Teddington. If there is an occupational hazard to being a bibliophile academic, in my case it is the tendency to sit down and read books for as long as anyone will leave me undisturbed. When one’s children are younger that tendecy is held in check; mine flew the nest some years back. The Thames Path walks were a way of taking a bit of exercise. So I thought I’d do it while cribb’d, cabin’d and confin’d (to an hour a day).

I began to take what I called #norfolkexercise walks. Here in the far south of Norfolk that turned out to consist of a rich network of ancient footpaths, some of which the local farmers had actually left in a walkable condition. The timings were dictated by the demands of my timetable, but the weekends provided opportunties for a really long walk. I quickly found, as those familiar with my Twitter feed will confirm, that my steps tended toward the Church pictured above – St Mary’s, Redenhall. The tower is quite spectacular, built by the powerful de la Pole family in the fifteenth century as an example of their wealth, it is a local landmark much beloved, I am told, by pilots; it is a thing of beauty.

One of the things about long walks is that it gives one time to reflect – and pray. For the first part of every walk I pray my daily Rosary, which gets me in the right frame of mind to contemplate what I see all around me, which is the wonder of the created world. Psalm 8 came frequently to mind:

⁴ What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

⁵ For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

⁶ Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:

What indeed? As the Pandemic reminded all of us of the fragility of human life and our powerlessness, the Churches decided, for perfectly obvious reasons, to close their doors. We were soon able to discover the wonder of Zoom church, and watch on-line services all over the world if we had access to a computer and the internet. But we were deprived of the Body and Blood of Our Lord. The Communion of fellowship was gone, and with it the Blessed Eucharist. It was a fast which went way beyond Lent and which drove me, at least, further into the resources of prayer. I had long before adopted the practice of praying the Offices of the Church at the week-end, and I extended this into a daily routine. Anyone getting the message I like my routines will be reading me aright. But without them, at such times, I wonder how I should have managed?

It has been an interesting discipline. The easy habits are to pray when one is joyful or sorrowful, happiness and sorrow tend to remind me of God. The daily routine has been interesting. There have been times when press of business – the ever-demanding Zoom – has made it hard to find the time. There have been times when the “mood” does not seem right. Yet this is, I have discovered, the whole point of regular daily prayer. It has ceased to be about “me” and has become about “Him”. I have found in that both a discipline and a liberation. However I “felt” when I started, I have always felt better when I finished. It has been similar with the walking and the Rosary. I have surprised myself at the extent to which it is possible to pray mindfully while walking. One falls into a rythmn, and it becomes as natural as breathing.

That “destiny” of which Newman spoke, and to which I referred in my last post, may be known only to God, but increasingly I have come to realise that Cavafy had the right of it in his great poem, Ithaka when he concluded that it was the journey, and not the destination which mattered:

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

And yes, as Ithaka approaches, Cavafy was right. The ends, in this world, may remain undiscovered, but it is the journey, and what it adds to what you brought to it that matters.