I have been struck the past few days of Epiphany by the image of the Magi. And somehow it feels like a symbol of this generation and perhaps a personal portent for the coming year.
It’s the seekers who find God. Not the religious who think they already have God.
The Magi were Persian priestly caste. As royal advisers and priests, they specialized in astrology and interpretation of dreams. From a Jewish or Christian perspective, they would have been viewed with side-eye, skepticism, seen as kind of foolish and misguided. But here’s the thing: Matthew’s gospel wants us to see that it was they who sought and found God, who discovered what God was doing, how God was moving in their time and place. And it was the traditional religious who completely missed it.
This resonates with the spirit of our time, our zeitgeist. Whether it’s the much touted decline in traditional church membership, the rise of the “Nones” and “spiritual but not religious,” or the explosion among the younger generations as explorers of other religious practices — mixed practice Buddhism, Wicca, Tarot, spiritism — people everywhere feel at the gut level the abysmal failure of institutional Christianity to speak to them spiritually or experientially. And they seek elsewhere. They’re willing to go look for it.
I am so encouraged and thrilled by this. God has never stopped speaking, never stopped reaching out to any and all who would diligently seek. The Divine One is so big, so incomprehensible, so unattainable in any absolute or definite sense, that the ONLY legitimate human response is continual pursuit. Digging deeper. Looking farther. Always. Like Abraham being called out of his tent in the middle of the night by a spiritual prompting, and told to look up at the stars and count them if he could. He could not, of course. But the exercise — get out of your tent, look up, and keep counting — is what the spiritual path is all about. And that’s what those Magi were doing.
May this year be full of deeper spiritual exploration for you. May you embrace that spirit of the Magi, and be willing to get out of your tents, and perhaps even mount up your camels. And may the Creator of the Universe reward you with your own deeper and more profound epiphanies.
Refs: Matthew 2:1-12
Image by sebastiano iervolino from Pixabay, cc.