Texts: Isaiah 60: 1-5a; Matthew 2: 1-10
Can You Still See the Star?
Here are a few lines from “The Journey of the Magi,” T. S. Eliot’s poem about the night passage of the wise men, as they follow an elusive star toward the manger in Bethlehem:
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.’
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
What motivates that long night passage that the wise men undertake? What is it that happens within them along the way? What is it, finally, that draws them, step by step, ever onward, even though “the ways are deep and the weather sharp?” What is the star they follow, and how does that star continue to inform our own night journeys, where the ways are deep and the weather sharp? I wonder if you’re able to perceive that star in your life, and if it draws you ever onward toward the source of your own, and the world’s, well being.
Those are the questions I would have us all consider this morning. But in truth, I would have us arrive at those questions by considering another star, and another night journey, one that I wish to read alongside the more familiar Christmas narrative. The star I have in mind can be found in the first canto of Dante’s Purgatorio, a work of literature that I read more than twenty years ago. I’ll be stitching those two stories together, Christmas and Purgatory, with the conviction that they might be one and the same story. But I hope the seam in my stitch will bind not only those two stories together. I hope it will lead to yet another seam, yet another stitch, which is your own story and my own. Christmas and Purgatory: two stories that demonstrate the stars in the night sky that we all have the capacity to follow, the stars that lead us to the affirmation of life found in that manger scene.
There is a star hanging in the night sky – can you see it?
So ok, I admit it: Dante is an unlikely source of revelation during Advent. He might be an unlikely source of revelation at any time. True confession: I didn’t love the Purgatorio, or any of the Divine Comedy when I first read it. For all the poetic power contained in all three of Dante’s great poems – the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, I felt troubled by the elaborate system of punishments and rewards that Dante imagined, and bored by the theological abstractions required to enter his vision in the first place. But I’ve found myself returning to Dante of late. In particular, I’ve returned to the star that appears at the beginning of the Purgatorio. That star speaks to a need that many of us are feeling right now.
It occurs after the poet has catalogued the worst aspects of the human condition in page after page of the Inferno. On his passage through hell, Dante and his guide, Virgil, encounter the greedy and those inflicted with an overinflated sense of self. They encounter the liars and the cheats, the perfidious and the slanderers, the thieves and those enthralled by violence. It’s a lurid rogue’s gallery of every imaginable deformation of the human spirit. And so it comes as a relief when the two pilgrims, Dante and Virgil, are finally expelled from the bottom of hell, landing on the shores of Mount Purgatory. In the Inferno, we confront the worst tendencies of human life, an account that might strike you, should you read it, as a prescient description of our current cultural predicament. That’s one of the reasons I’ve returned to Dante of late. He is an astute observer of the human condition, including its sorriest and basest tendencies.
But that’s not why I find Dante so helpful right now. We’re often reminded of those base tendencies these days, and so I’m not sure how beneficial it is to dwell with all of them in Dante’s hell. Instead, it’s the reappearance of the star after passing through hell that I find most instructive. If one third of Dante’s Commedia is devoted to the worst parts of humanity, it’s worth observing that the latter two thirds is devoted to rebuilding and reconstituting the best of who we are. And it’s the Purgatorio that provides that vision in a most exemplary way. It’s a narrative about a slow and gradual redress of life’s wounds, a parable about how to put life back together when it’s been stripped of hope. The star guides Dante and Virgil as they and others steadily heal from the many disfigurements of soul they have witnessed along the way, disfigurements they have also internalized. You see, when they arrive on the shores of purgatory, it’s a holy hospital, a sacred therapy, that our pilgrims have discovered.
A star still hangs in that night sky. Can you see it?
I don’t know that many of us take the notion of purgatory literally. I sure don’t. But I’ve begun to take it seriously, just as I’ve begun to take seriously the star that guides Dante and Virgil, and the wise men with them. It’s an image we can use right now. It indicates how signals and directions can emerge in each of our lives helping us to make amends and right ourselves after a mistake. It hints at how we can become reoriented as we rebuild and refashion ourselves after painful events. It suggests the possibility of movement – toward healing, and toward an emotional and spiritual enlargement. Unsure of where to go, or how to proceed, there are times in our lives that a star appears. By following it, we find ourselves coming back to life, slowly but steadily being drawn toward our own flourishing.
Has something like that ever happened to you? I have a hunch that following the star, whether that of the wise men or that of the Purgatorio, is a universal story, something we all experience. With the right kind of care, and with enough time, we discover that an old wound doesn’t hurt so much anymore. We realize that an old weakness doesn’t define us in the ways it once did. Those recovering from addiction know something about stars, and purgatory, in Dante’s sense – the arduous journey required in order to build habits that give life, instead of destroying it, and the need for a guiding light to show the way forward. Those who have gone through a divorce or a separation or the death of a spouse know something about that process – having to reconstruct your life in the absence of a partner takes a long, long time. But with time, and with enough careful orientation, something like regeneration can occur. Those who have had to let a dream, or a life direction go, whether from necessity or accident, know what it is to rebuild and recover and reorient over a long stretch of time. But really, anybody who has embarked upon a quest for deeper wisdom and maturity in life knows something about purgatory, and stars, in Dante’s sense. We leave certain things behind, things that may have weighed us down or kept us imprisoned. And we begin a journey of discovery and refashioning, trusting in grace, guided by a hopeful star.
There is a star hanging in the night sky. Can you see it?
I’ve been acutely aware of how true that’s been in my own life. This community has been a kind of holy hospital for me, a place of steady, almost imperceptible healing in my own life. Ever since I was in divinity school, I had known in some part of my being that I thrived doing this kind of work – being with people, being in community, struggling collectively to find hope and justice together, using our sacred stories to lead us toward such realities. I also knew I wanted to pursue doctoral work, and so I did. But along the way I lost touch with what truly provided me life. I began chasing a life path that didn’t make me happy. In fact, it made me feel competitive, and lonely, and alienated, most of all from myself. By any external measure, I was succeeding, but inside, I was in pain. It took a while to steady myself – it meant getting back in touch with my inner life. By the time I arrived here, I was well on my way. Somewhere in the midst of being with all of you, I realized that the pain wasn’t there anymore. I realized that I’m happy. That has to do with the freedom and grace that you’ve afforded me. But it also has to do with the work we’ve been able to do together, most notably all the stuff we celebrated last night at the Florence Griswold Museum. I want you to know that you’ve been a star for me, guiding me through what has sometimes felt like a purgative journey in my own life.
But I also want to pursue this notion of following a star toward restoration and healing along another axis. A major source of the dystopian gloom that many of us are feeling has to do with ecology, and with the dire and mostly unheeded predictions we’ve all absorbed about the state of our planet. I don’t need to tell you how it’s becoming a kind of hell through human inflicted stressors placed upon the environment. People are beginning to suffer, and animals are suffering. The very ground beneath our feet is suffering. In that, we’re not unlike Dante and Virgil, trudging through the inferno. But I think many of us get lost in that inferno – and who can blame us if we do. I was glad to see that Greta Thunberg is Time Magazine’s person of the year, and even more pleased to see her prophetic voice being amplified. She is a star that we could all stand to follow these days. But I also think we need an ecological Purgatorio, visions not of gloom, but of a restorative and healing process of recovery. In truth, we’re laying on the shores of that great mountain of restoration even now, and there are stars waiting to guide us. I’d like to share one of them with you in the time that remains.
Not long ago I listened to an interview with John and Molly Chester, who run a farm in California called Apricot Lane Farms. That farm is the subject of a new documentary called The Biggest Little Farm, a film that I watched this past week. It’s not a Christmas movie, but it captures the aspect of Christmas that we’re tracking this week, following a star across a long and arduous journey, trusting that it leads toward some vision of flourishing. If you wish to feel a spark of joy this season, if you wish to encounter a sense of hope that all is not lost, if you wish to sense that there is a star that continues to shine, and that it is leading us toward a healing and restorative future, I commend that film to all of you. I dare you to feel downcast after watching it.
John and Molly start their journey living in a small apartment in Santa Monica, cobbling together an income from various creative endeavors they both pursued. But they dreamed of living closer to the earth, and so after sharing their vision with some friends, they bought two hundred acres of degraded farmland an hour north of Los Angeles. The land had been ravaged by decades of monoculture farming and pesticide application, which robbed the soil of essential nutrients. The film is a study in how regenerative farming can bring a patch of earth back to life as a kind of purgative process. “It’s all about the soil,” John and Molly explain. Repairing that nutrient depleted soil was followed by planting some 10,000 orchard trees and over 200 crops. That was accompanied by introducing a host of animals onto the farm, and then managing the chaos that ensued. There have been setbacks and heartbreaks along the way. But what finally developed was an awe inspiring ecosystem that is fully attuned to nature’s rhythms, a vast symphony where each creature has a part to play. In the process, John and Molly are doing what’s required in order to make an ecological change: they’re sequestering carbon, building biodiversity, and they’re creating a sustainable food supply. The film dispenses with the gloomy dystopian thinking of so much ecological literature, and it leaves us uplifted about the possibility of a hard won healing. The Biggest Little Farm is an ecological version of Dante’s Purgatorio, where restoration and renewal steadily take shape. It’s a parable of what might yet be.
A star shines in the night sky – can you see it?
I come late to my stitch in the seam between Dante and Christmas. No doubt you’re wondering if I’ve forgotten the wise men, and the star they follow. I haven’t. I’ve been talking about it all along. I’ve come to believe that the star of the wise men and the star guiding Dante and Virgil along the way of restoration and healing is the very same star. I’ve come to believe that the deepest meaning of Christmas might actually be that holy hospital, that sacred therapy of our individual and collective souls, that I’ve been describing. The wise men, the shepherds, Mary and Joseph, the entire cast of the Christmas story undertake their journey for much the same reason that Dante and Virgil undertake their own – they too need a vision of hope. They too need some assurance that the world hasn’t been abandoned to its worst impulses. They too follow a sign, one that indicates that there is a holy goodness stirring at the heart of all things, one that insists, all evidence to the contrary, that God so loved the world, enough to enter it as a vulnerable child. I’ve come to think that the journey of the wise men, along with all the rest of the Christmas cast, exists along a pathway of healing and slow regenerative growth, where, step by heavy step, they labor through the night toward the source of their hope.
And is that not our journey too? Is that not the work that each of us is called to every Advent season – trusting that a star still shines, that the world is still beloved, and that God hasn’t abandoned us to our worst traits and impulses? If we can let ourselves trust this most sacred of stories, then perhaps we’ll also come to trust the goodness at the heart of all things, to realize that human agency still exists, and that a healing and hopeful regenerative process is still possible. Is that not what this entire season is about? I know – there’s a dystopian spirit in the air these days that can fill all of us with a sense of dark foreboding. But I want you to know that these ancient stories that we return to year after year are trustworthy, and reliable. I want you to hear that older sources of wisdom like that of Dante can still speak to our condition. And I want you to know that a star is still shining, beckoning, luring, daring us to keep moving across what can feel like a dark landscape, where the way is deep, and the weather is sharp.
A star still shines in the night sky. It’s there. It really is. Can you see it?
