December 11, 2008
Thursday

The vagabond Mother of Christ
And the vagabond men of wisdom,
All in a barn on a winter night,
And a baby there in swaddling clothes on hay —
Why does the story never wear out?
                      — Carl Sandburg, 1878-1967
                          American poet and historian
                          “Star Silver” 1953

I was a senior in high school the first time I bought Christmas cards of my own to send to friends. It was a Saturday in early December, and I was spending the day in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where auditions for a statewide student music festival were taking place at the high school. Like any audition event, there was a lot of waiting time between rounds. During one of the lulls in the action, I walked across the street with some girlfriends to the Hershey Drug Store. We probably got a fountain soda, the old-fashioned kind, prepared by a “soda jerk” who mixed the syrup and the carbonated water himself (and maybe for an extra penny added a shot of lemon or cherry flavor) and served it in a paper cup that slipped into a metal holder.

On our way out of the store I stopped at the shelves of boxed Christmas cards. I remember distinctly the artwork that caught my eye — a painting of the three wise men in colorful robes and jeweled crowns riding camels across golden sand, all set against a deep blue night sky swirled with silver stars. I picked the box up. The cards opened from the bottom. Inside was Carl Sandburg’s poem. “The silver of one star/Plays cross-lights against pine green,” it begins. Sandburg was popular then, and I knew a lot of his work, but not that poem.

That Christmas season of 1964 my own practice was almost entirely an exercise in family and cultural ritual rather than an expression of an inner spirituality. Both in my home and in my Catholic school, the season was a jumble of the sacred and the secular, a jolly mix of jingle bells and Jesus. I bought the cards because I had $2.00 to spend and because I liked the poem and the painting. I was more than fifteen years away from the point at which I would develop an understanding of (and a belief in) the season’s essential message of hope and joy entering a weary world. I just wanted to send personal greetings to my friends, most of whom, of course, were classmates I saw every day. I could not have known then that of all the elements of the Christmas story, it would be the metaphor of the wise men set out on a journey that would come to have the most meaning for me.

The gospel text doesn’t give us much. Some men (it doesn’t say how many) — maybe they’re wise men, or astrologers, or sorcerers, or kings even — show up in Jerusalem seeking “the child who has been born king of the Jews.” They’ve followed a star to get that far, but evidently have to ask around in town after this wondrous child. They’re directed to Bethlehem, and asked to report the exact location, so the local ruler can pay homage as well. The travellers find the child and deliver their gifts. But they are warned in a dream not to return to Jerusalem, so they leave “for their own country by another road.” Everything else — their names, the idea that there are three (and one of them is black!), their overnight stay with a poor widow and her crippled son, their encounters with Italian witches and drummer boys, even their camels — is an embroidery on the gospel text, which is itself (at least in my belief system) more allegory than reportage.

And maybe that’s why I’m drawn to the story. The wise men step out in faith with a clear purpose but a plan of action that must be revised as they go along. They leave behind the safe and the familiar and head into the unknown. When they achieve their purpose they don’t linger long, but begin their journey back “by another road.” They might eventually end up where they started, but they will be utterly changed, and much the better for having gone there and done that.

The story never wears out because it’s a human story. It’s my story. I’ve stepped out in faith more than once — left one marriage that had come to a dead end and entered another with hope, had a child at midlife, left a career that had become soul-killing, watched and waved encouragement as that beloved child set out on her own road. I’m like Narnia’s Lucy, her hand on the door of the wardrobe, warned not to try to take the same route twice.

My hand is on the door of a new year. “The sheen of it all/Is a star silver and a pine green.” I’m ready for the new road.

*********

A year ago, I answered my alumni association’s question, What’s new? with a picture of Buffalo Tongue Rock in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming.

Two years ago, I visited a recently-widowed friend and recalled an amusing incident with two of her sons.

Three years ago, I reported on seeing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Four years ago, I visited Toys-R-Us for the first time in many years in search of something for the church Angel Giving Tree.

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