The Magi by Malcolm Guite
It might have been just someone else's story;
Some chosen people get a special king,
We leave them to their own peculiar glory,
We don't belong, it doesn't mean a thing.
But when these three arrive
they bring us with them,
Gentiles like us, their wisdom might be ours;
A steady step that finds an inner rhythm,
A pilgrim's eye that sees beyond the stars.
They did not know his name
but still they sought him
They came from otherwhere
but still they found;
In palaces they found those
who sold and bought him,
But in the filthy stable, hallowed ground.
Their courage gives our
questing hearts a voice
To seek, to find, to worship, to rejoice.
It could have so easily been a gift for a chosen few, the wondrous gift of God’s embodied self. Only for a select group of people, the VIPs. However, the love of God turned out to be far more radical than that. It included everyone, even the people we’d rather it didn’t, and most shockingly it included us. In the magi we can see ourselves, in our own long and often unexpected search for God. It is not surprising to us that we are forever reaching out toward God, but every year, every week, every hour, this very moment, I continue to be blown away by the fact that God is reaching out to us, too.
Happy Epiphany Everyone!