All the World

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy; and going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him."

-- Matthew 2:10-11

In his poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” the late W.H. Auden writes, ‘Follow, poet, follow right/ To the bottom of the night, / With your unconstraining voice/ Still persuade us to rejoice; // With the farming of a verse/ Make a vineyard of the curse, / Sing of human unsuccess/ In a rapture of distress; // In the deserts of the heart/ Let the healing fountain start,/ In the prison of his days/ Teach the free man how to praise.” Note the paradoxes: we are to rejoice at the bottom of the night, to sing of human unsuccess, to celebrate a rapture of distress, to drink from springs in desert hearts, and praise from the prison of our days. This paradox of life is the poet’s principal theme, and the Evangelist’s truth.

Here in the second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel we have great joy, like the joy of the shepherds we preached about on Christmas Eve, the light of a miraculous star that pierces the darkness, and the presentation of sumptuous gifts to the Holy Family – Christmas as we like it.  We also have grief and terror - the murder of babies in Bethlehem less than two years old. There are not only three kings in our story, there are four; three are wise and one is terrible, three come to worship, one comes to kill. The worshipers are Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, the killer is Herod; together they represent the whole world, part joy, part horror, all paradox.

For Herod is as essential to the truth as the other three, if our faith is not to be a device for our evasion of history rather than an affirmation of God’s invasion of history. Human history is a place where tyrants massacre babies as well as a place where adoring adults shower them with gifts. That’s why Auden’s poet needs to persuade us to rejoice, and why the poetic voice is so essential to our sanity. In a recent New Yorker Adam Zagajewski has a poem called, “Poetry searches for Radiance,” translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh. It seems appropriate to the festival of the three kings: “Poetry searches for radiance, / poetry is the kingly road/ that leads us farthest. / We seek radiance in a gray hour, / at noon or in the chimneys of the dawn, / even on a bus, in November, / while an old priest nods beside us. /…Also moments of deep joy/ and countless moments of anxiety./ Let me see, I ask./ Let me persist, I say./ A cold rain falls at night./ In the streets and avenues of my city/ quiet darkness is hard at work. / Poetry searches for radiance.” (New Yorker, December 23&30, 2002, p.161).

Poetry searches for radiance where quiet darkness is hard at work. Poetry searches for radiance and poetry persuades us to rejoice, but to those who believe, the Gospel is already more than all the poetry in the world. Poetry searches and persuades, the Gospel discloses and reveals the pure and unalloyed divine joy, beyond the need to search or be persuaded, because its star already shines where poetry merely searches, in the gray hour where quiet darkness is hard at work, shines on the Savior, whose crib is love, whose cross is faith and whose resurrection is hope of eternal life.

Poetry asks, “Where?” The Gospel cries out, “Here!” This star enlightens all those who come into the world and all who go out from it through the valley of the shadow, many, perhaps most, of whom have not knowingly read a word of poetry in all that sojourn. But there is not a one so unlettered as cannot hear the Gospel’s cry, “Here! Come here! Look here!” Thus the star reveals what poetry seeks, “the kingly road that leads farthest,” the road to the Savior Jesus Christ in his cradle of humble love.

The paradox, however, remains, the paradox of light in darkness, opulence in poverty, royalty bowing to peasants, the divine in human form and the greatest power willingly subordinated to the greatest weakness, God as a helpless babe. None of this makes sense as we normally reckon sense, that glib reckoning that confirms our own assumptions, that leaves us unchallenged and unchanged, condemned to do time within the confines of what we have always known, - what Auden calls “the prison of our days”- impervious to paradox or surprise.

Pardon me for quoting yet again, but every now and then I suffer a literary effusion. Do you recognize this? “Religion is the sigh of the creature overwhelmed by misfortune, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” When I give you the next sentence you will recognize it immediately. But let’s play detective. We deduce from the implied definition of religion as a subjective attitude that it is a 19th century quotation, and from its subtext that it comes from an atheist who thought that religion shaped such subjectivity spuriously. Life is misfortune, the world is heartless and the conditions of most are soulless. Religion dishonestly pretends that this is not so. The next line in the quotation is “Religion is the opium of the people,” and thus we immediately recognize Karl Marx.  He saw the paradox of faith and resolved it by canceling the positive side of the ledger. There are other attempts, like Christian Science and most forms of Hinduism, Buddhism and other Eastern religions that dissolve the paradox by erasing the other, negative, side of the ledger. The heartless, soulless self is not real.

We, however, live full of blessing in the midst of misfortune, full of compassion in a heartless world, radiant with the love of God under soulless conditions. God is in the midst of it all, and He loves it so much that He gives and gives His only Son that all of us who believe in him might in the midst of death live eternal life, and walk firmly through the valley of the shadow.

I recommend for your reading the book, Persuade us to Rejoice: The Liberating Power of Fiction, by my late colleague Robert McAfee Brown, from which I took the Auden quote, and which is a good exposition of the paradox in terms of modern fiction. He shows how good fiction can disclose the truth, and I must add good music, sculpture, painting and poetry too. But it must be good, not airport paperbacks, not doggerel verse and not mawkish music. Art challenges and disturbs in order to exalt and ennoble.

Epiphany is the festival of the star whose light shines throughout the world to show the way to Jesus. We believe that all the nations must, and eventually will, come to him, that every knee shall imitate the kings who bow before him, and every tongue confess that Christ is Lord. It stands to reason; every healthy human mind knows that the love that cares for the child is true and the terror that kills him is false. We know that even now, so let us turn from war, from the imitation of Herod, whose hands are stained with baby’s blood. There are four kings on stage at Epiphany, three come to worship, one comes to kill. That’s a pretty fair summary of the real world. Let us give thanks for the wise and prudent three, and try to be like them! And let us deal with the fourth as we must.

Amen.