Star in the East

I

WHAT if the Christmas story had never been told? Try for a moment to erase from human history, from art, from our own childhood memories and our own adult associations, all references to Christmas. For a moment look steadfastly at life on this planet with Christmas altogether blotted out from the past, the present, and the future. Our first reaction to this effort at obliteration is a curious chilliness, a sense of dull fog; rising clouds seem to climb the blue night sky and gradually dim and then destroy a mounting star. At the thought of no Christmas ever, anywhere, we shiver a little and then brace ourselves to meet once more a blackening world. Gaze into the past two thousand years as if they formed a looming chasm, in which century beyond century towers dark. Examine that ebon space of time slowly, patiently, and perceive it illumined every year by a tiny prick of light, a glinting spark there in the East, called Christmas. But what if Christmas had never been?

Or look not into the inky past, but out into the world around us. War planes droning from every sky, bombs blasting happy streets, everywhere armament piling, piling, on every border guns of men snarling to murder their brothers — what of Christmas to-day for you and me? Has the Nativity story faded into folklore, into fairy tale? Or is the Christmas concept swung like a star before the climbing imagination of man, a light which, once planted in the black sky, has become forever inescapable? Still every year, we pause a day’s length in our blind plunging, to gaze Eastward, there to see, against the silent midnight heaven, pictures that infallibly recur, and to hear out of mysterious stillness music that yearly rings out unconquerable above all cannon. Christmas — is it something become as obsolete as the fleeting forest doves, or is it an imperishable dream that a blundering humanity, still lurching upright from the beast, shall one day make true?

Christmas is worth our examining; yet not Christmas as defined in the dictionary, but rather the actual living Christmas, as it exists with all its manifold associations in human brains and hearts to-day. There are two accounts of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and only two. From these two accounts come the Christmas pictures indelibly painted upon our imaginations. To one of these records we owe the fact that every one of us can instantly call to mind a blue-black Oriental night, cupping with mystery all earth’s stretching miles. Breathless with impending fate, we gaze into the dark East, waiting. Once more it happens — the horizon pulses with a faint white which slowly spreads and brightens. Above those far-off watchful hills there appears the glint as of a taper pressing upward from the enveloping dark beyond. Then slowly, as we watch, there rises once again the inexorable star. Strange beyond all strangeness, the mounting radiance climbs the heaven.

Far, far off now upon that landscape inimitably dark, figures form against the eastward skyline. Three camels loom, three swaying palanquins, in each a cloaked and kingly figure seated. The eyes of the three gaze forward, never swerving from the certain aim of their journey. The padded feet of the camels with rhythmic certitude bear onward to the west. The folds of the regal cloaks ripple down into shadow, gold gleams on the hooded foreheads, and hands strong and motionless hold jeweled gifts. We cannot count the years in which Christendom has witnessed that recurrent journey. We cannot recall when first as children we watched the kings of the East ride westward to Jerusalem through the night.

We remember that they are more than kings, these men of mystery who, at the command of a star, journey from their distant palaces to do homage. They are also astrologers whose office is to discover and foretell destiny. Within their splendid homes they have traveled as far as human brains can carry them into the curious conduct of the earth-bound soul. All the secrets of the intellect they have penetrated, only to cast from them all their proud attainment, and kneel in worship before a baby prince just born.

It is an ancient story; every one of us remembers it at Christmas time. Each of us, long educated to Christmas, witnesses every year the arrival of the Magi in Jerusalem, startling those humdrum streets with their most curious demand, ‘Where is He?’ At last the buzzing crowds bring the report to that sovereign of earth, rotting old Herod in his palace. In the presence of these majestic strangers his fears flare higher. The craft of terror speaks in his voice, hoarse with remembered murders: ‘When you have discovered the newborn king, bring me word that I, too, may seek him to give him worship.’ We behold the serene obeisance as the monarchs from afar leave the council chamber, having now obtained their clue, Bethlehem of Judæa. The spellbound fancy of our childhood once again watches a renewed journey out of the proud city into the night. Again we wait for the star to mount and guide them. It stands at last, white and mysterious, above a door that opens, while the Wise Men enter to offer their gifts, kneeling, to the tiny newborn king of the Jews.

We should like to forget the shudder that as children we experienced at the sequel — the babies of Bethlehem massacred to feed a monarch’s fear. It was the fashion then for a dictator merely to murder. Holy Innocents we rightly call them, for no Bethlehem two-year-old, nor yet that haloed baby within the door, ever had his life snuffed out by poison gas! And all to save the might of might, lest peace come to the earth!

It is the biographer named Matthew who has given our imaginations this journey of three kings from the mysterious East. The other of the two Nativity narratives, Luke’s, rests on a totally different conception of the coming of a God-man. We need to keep in mind that it is a birth story with a twofold approach which has come to signify to us what we term ‘Christmas.’ In Matthew there is no manger; in Luke there are no Magi. It is necessary to reread Luke’s first chapters most carefully in order to ascertain precisely what these have contributed to the stored riches of our lifelong association with the word ‘Christmas.’

Matthew’s purpose is to prove that the crucified felon, Jesus of Nazareth, was in reality the Jewish Messiah immemorially expected. Throughout Matthew ancient prophecy, authenticated, rings from every page like a chime. In harmony with this constant objective, that of establishing Jesus as the promised Messiah, the Gospel of Matthew describes the visit of the proudest monarchs of earth to the birth chamber of a Hebrew king. Majestic as is this incident, and pregnant with prophecy mysteriously fulfilled, the infant Jesus revealed in Matthew remains a tribal God. Luke’s biography, on the other hand, is the first great Christian apologia presented to a pagan world. Written by a Greek to a Roman about a Jew, it has revealed for nineteen centuries the universality of the Christian faith.

Not utterly can you and I, modern men and women, kneel beside proud alien kings to gaze at divinity made mortal. We need something greater than a Hebrew Messiah for the worship of to-day, which has begun to reverence man, and is now climbing to ever more energizing conceptions of his origin. To-day we require no Magi to impress us, for we can bow our spirits only in the stable dung before a human baby, so beautiful that he shines star-bright as he lies there. Neither then nor now has there ever been time in humanity’s hurrying inns to contemplate the manner of God’s coming to earth. Taught from year to year, from century to century, by Luke’s Christmas story, to-day we are learning to behold in every baby a miracle from God.

II

While through Matthew we have come to possess the star, the Magi, and the massacre, everything else that Scripture has contributed to our Christmas concept we have obtained from Luke. Let us study, then, what Paul’s ‘beloved physician’ has given to the world in the most beautiful story of birth ever written. Wherever he discovered them, it is Luke who set down the first Christmas carols. The memories that Luke has bequeathed to us are as melodious with music as they are bright with picture. While Matthew tabulates prophecy line by line, Luke paints men and women whose whole lives pulse with expectation.

A doubter expresses faith restored: ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people.’

Innumerable churches echo Luke’s Christmas chant of an old man who had waited in unconquerable hope until he held a little village baby in his arms: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’

What would have been lost to human liturgy if Luke had never set to words the triumph of all motherhood throughout all time: ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord!’

Spreading from Christmas time to overflow all adoration throughout the year peals forever, through Christian worship, Luke’s ‘Hail Mary.’

Who of us, of whatever faith, or no faith, is not startled to awe together with Judæan shepherds gazing at the night sky riven by tiers of angelic choirs caroling at Christmas: ‘Glory to God, the unfathomable, and glad news to all men who hold God’s own kindness in their hearts. Unto you is born this night in near-by Bethlehem, on the trodden mud of a stable, the Deliverer of the world.’

The Christmas story, thus hurriedly I have tried to summarize it — camels shouldering the night, eyes mysteriously wise beneath the dusky, gleaming crowns, all made bright by the star beam that cleaves the eastward darkness; nearer by, shepherds that lift their marveling gaze to the familiar heaven suddenly rent with glory and spilling angelic song. The march of the shepherds and the journey of the Wise Men are actually, as we know, two far-sundered tales, but human imagination has made forever one the approach of the Magi and the herdsmen to a little swaddled baby lying glorious in a manger. Every creche in every household represents the kings and the shepherds bowed side by side in adoration, just as it shows familiar ox and ass and sheep pressing upon the feet of the camels from out the East.

But there is more than all this included in the Christmas story as Luke tells it. There is a preceding Visitant, at whose news a girl, white and astounded, cries, ‘But how shall these things be?’ Then, so we are told, a Power from Beyond possessed her and she conceived the Holy Child. For the towering Herald had pronounced the keynote of a strange new faith about to be born to a heavy world: ‘With God all things are possible.’

Thus a Greek doctor presents the birth story of the man he gave half a lifetime to portraying. But what if Luke’s story had never been told? Then would there never have been a Christian creed? It takes martyrs to found any faith. Would the manger have driven any man or woman to the arena or the gibbet or the blazing fagots? Would Christmas drive you or me to lay down life for love of the Christ-baby? Neither long ago nor now has Christmas made martyrs. Yet it is already conceivable that in some far day, as year by year we become sensitized to the beauty of the Christmas hope, men and women may be found ready to give their lives to establish upon earth the beauty of a Child.

That the new religion was not dependent on Christmas for its acceptance is readily proved. For more than fifty years it had run its flaming hidden way along the Mediterranean coast before Christianity records a Christmas. It was not a baby in a manger but a man upon a cross who planted a mustard seed. It was not a miraculous coming to earth but a miraculous return to it that drove the first missionaries to their doom still shouting hope. Out of many there remain to-day only four little pamphlet biographies that describe the impact upon his own time of the most mysterious man in human history. Of these four only two tell anything of their hero’s birth. Of the other two, Mark, which is the earliest account and nearest to the events it chronicles, says nothing of a baby, but instantly presents a man who blazes a meteor track across his day, and then rushes madly to his death. The other, John, latest and most appraising of the four, also makes no mention of a childhood, but again only describes a man, one who went to his cross to establish for humanity a new principle of growth — forgiveness. There is in Mark and in John no hint of Christmas.

III

So far I have been looking into the past to find what our idealism has formulated and forever possesses in regard to Christmas. But there is another aspect to be considered, and there is a query to be frankly faced. The ancient church, I have said, needed no Christmas; but someone might ask, ‘Does not the modern church need it? Are not certain doctrines inherently dependent on the Christmas narratives of Matthew and of Luke? There is, for example, a mystery pitifully wrangled over, called the Incarnation. Someone might even go so far as to inquire, ‘Pray what do you, a modern woman who dares to call herself Christian, what do you yourself really think about Christmas? Be honest with us others who can but smile gently at miracle stories and wonders. Tell us, you who otherwise speak our language and read our books and laugh our laughter, how does this Christmas tale actually affect you in your struggle to pattern a twentieth-century life on a first-century Example?’

The Christmas creed of one presentday Christian — shall I try to formulate it? I have no authority, of course, to speak for more than one person. I find it hard to go back to my far-off child dreams when I waited to hear the herald angels sing. Do I still hear them to-day? No — and yes. Once, caught up in wonder, I watched the march of three camels through the night, carrying three kings to worship a swaddled baby. Do I still marvel at their wisdom? Do I still lift awed eyes to the white radiance above them? No — and yes.

One Christian’s creed of Christmas, that is what I am trying to set down here and now. I cannot restrain a rueful smile, nor conquer a wistful helplessness at the effort, for who will listen? Why should I struggle to ascertain from within myself what I actually think about Christmas if Christmas is only a legend, or at best merely a fable or a gracious fairy tale? If Christianity itself, as so many affirm, has become only a curious and half-forgotten creed, it seems fatuous to try to explain the relation of Christmas to that creed. The faith of the Galilean, the faith in the Galilean, it has become a star that is set — perhaps.

As I look forth, our earth of to-day appears singularly like that of the first Christmas Eve. The world of that night was black, outworn, hopeless. It stretched between its seas, bleak waste or unawakened jungle; or, beneath one famous futile civilization piled upon another, it lay dying. Where life still pulsed about the rim of the Mediterranean, that life was diseased with mounting despair. One gazes back into increasing dusk; then against that darkness a tiny light, incredibly tiny, in the East. Near that light Herod still ruled, a ruthless tyrant, over timorous millions.

After nineteen hundred years, is the stretching expanse of this planet so different to-day, with its guns and its gases and its gun-crazed human hearts? Suppose long ago some shepherd who had just witnessed bright hosts of angels, and a little newborn child, should have run the brief miles to Herod’s Jerusalem, shouting his news. What would have happened to him or to his tidings in those old incredulous streets? Not even the Wise Men in all their majesty of mind dared return to face Herod, who could murder. And what fantastic glee or far worse fate would meet anyone who in any capital of the world to-day dared announce that Christmas dream recurrent through all the heaped black centuries, the dream that one day the child-spirit shall rule a world of men subdued by the kindness within their own hearts?

Already this much of promise has occurred — down through all the years there has been a little band that has seen and believed a star. In a heavily agnostic world, in a world that kills and kills, and even teaches killing to its little children, this tiny band preserves its confidence that the lamp of hope the Galilean set burning shall never die. There is even now and then a Christian who dares to cry, ‘I believe!’ not in the safe precincts of a church, but out in the jostling market place, or even in the jostling pages of a modern magazine. This, then, is what one Christian holds true of our faith and of our Christmas.

There once flashed across history a man who remains inexplicable. In nineteen centuries we have advanced hardly a foot’s length in understanding him. In some mysterious way he continues within hand’s reach of every one of us, still challenging. But we always crucify him for saying, ‘Follow me!’ Because his hand points a way we dare not follow, we drive a nail through it; we each pound through that flesh our own particular spike of disbelief and abhorrence. We hate this Jesus above all because we know he always forgives us. Incessantly he is strung up on a cross solely because he is kind. For we are all afraid to be kind. We are still beasts only just emerging from the clay out of which God would create us men if we dared let him. Once God set before us an Example for our self-creation, but the chief use we have made of Jesus of Nazareth is to keep him somewhere within our souls so that we may freely spit upon him while we continue to do safe obeisance to Herod and to Pilate. The worst thing we have ever done to Jesus is to call ourselves Christian, for thus we have crucified him with creeds, while we went about our business of inventing better and better bombs to kill babies.

Still there have always been some who have perceived the light from the East, and feebly enough have tried to follow it; though it has never been — not yet — a child that we followed, but a man. Just as for the ancient world, so for us, the news to clutch our fainting hearts was not that a mysterious baby was once born into the world, but that a yet more mysterious man is still in it. This curious motive-doctrine of our religion is still called, for lack of a more blazing word, the Resurrection. It was not the coming into life but the return from death that first gripped with hope the slaves and the wharf rats and the fearless-eyed fishermen who met the night in little boats.

For decade after decade the new religion had no Christmas, but rather a cross for its enlightening. In some strange way, however, the need was coming not merely for the austere tapers of the catacombs, but for the ruddy candles of home. People began to ask for fuller knowledge of their Hero than his death and his return. Where had he been born and how, this so human God of theirs? Search must have begun. It was Luke that found some source whose ancient Aramaic origin is suggested by the archaic forms chosen by his gifted pen in its translation into Greek. So it came about that the early church now began to add to its teaching of the harsh cruelty of the Crucifixion and of the mystic wonder of the Resurrection a humbler, homelier story. Converts now began to hear of the awed approach of shepherds to a baby in a manger, and of camels from afar bringing wise men to worship. Gently all liturgy grew sweet with those ancient Christmas chants, and every year people found themselves harkening to a strange new promise sung down from the sky to listening men on earth.

IV

Yet I seem to hear still sounding that persistent query: ‘But do you, a modern woman called Christian, do you really believe all this Christmas story, or any of it?’ And my answer is Yes — and no. Yes, I believe the Christmas narrative has become so blazoned upon our imaginations, so carved into our aspiring souls, so knit into the warp and woof of all our idealism, that if it were somehow wrenched from our being we should be crippled forever in our blind upward climb. There are some things truer than truth, and of these things I believe the angels singing ‘In excelsis’ is one. Did actual Magi once travel from their far high palaces to offer gifts to a newborn child? I do not know; but I do know actual wise men of to-day who journey from the far places of the intellect humbly to bow before the King of the Jews. Every year I gaze at a picture sacred with unguessed hope — a radiant baby, cradled, and bending over him a mother spent yet adoring, and a man kneeling close beside to protect this most mysterious gift from God. Lightly enough we call this picture the Holy Family, not always perceiving its promise, that one day all the families of the earth shall become holy. Yes, I believe the Christmas truth that one day men shall arise in the might of kindness, casting from them forever the beast.

But actually, do I believe the Christmas story in all its physical literalness? No, and for the simplest of reasons: Jesus himself never asked me to believe it. I do not hold myself responsible for accepting anything Jesus does not ask me to accept. Jesus spoke of his paternity often enough, but never in terms of the Nativity story, rather in terms incalculably harder to believe. To me the enigma of Jesus lies not in his manner of entering earth, nor yet in his manner of leaving it; the enigma lies in his continuing influence. For me, the more I study the man of mystery, from birth to death, the more the word Incarnation has come to signify not a doctrine but a daily adventure. The little child entrusted to Mary and Joseph grew to be a man known to the world as Jesus of Nazareth. It was, I believe, the function of this Jesus to reveal the steps by which we climb from the beast within us to the God within us. Because I have seen God born in a stable, wrapped in everyday swaddling bands, surrounded by familiar ox and ass and sheep, tended by a village man and woman, welcomed by shaggy-clad Judæan shepherds fresh from their stony pastures — because of this I see in the Incarnation the seeding of all the commonplace by the divine. I perceive a new splendor in every doorsill because the Carpenter was always passing in and out of everyday doors — and is still passing.

Because it is so easy for me to behold the baby of Bethlehem grown into a man who would join in every earth-made joy, who would light the candles and lead the carols, because I see always his earthpresence in all our merriment, it is easy enough for me to delight in the aspects of our Christmas that have nothing to do with sacred story. In fact, I cannot for my life understand how anyone who has ever tried to follow the Incarnation of Jesus can ever again distinguish between the sacred and the secular.

I believe this Jesus of Nazareth, who wore our flesh often so joyously, who went to weddings and feasts, who watched the children playing in the market place and knew by heart their lilting rhymes, this Jesus who had watched a worn hand patch a worn coat, who had perhaps himself helped tread the grapes in some upland vineyard, who had perhaps himself broken a glowing lily to brighten some despairing home, who had yearned to gather all his murderous Jerusalem to the safe home-place of his heart even as a hen gathers her brood beneath her wings — I believe this same Jesus stands gazing in at all our Christmas trees and at the children dancing around them, and laughs with them his laughter that shall one day ring victorious down all the dark ages. Of all his strange sayings that have been preserved to us the strangest is ‘My joy I leave with you,’ spoken to his friends on the blackest evening of his life.

I believe Jesus of Nazareth every year takes delight in our Christmas candles and joins the young carolers who of late have begun to sing beneath the windows of hospitals and of jails. Surely he must love the red holly even as he loved the whitening barley of his own Palestinian fields. He takes pleasure in our bright wreaths, and our laden tables and our gift-giving, and our journeying from far places to be at home on Christmas. It is recorded of him that he sweated blood at the thought of leaving this earth whose joys we hold so cheap that on only one day of all the year do we dare to be utterly glad and utterly kind.

But some day the Christmas dream shall come true for all the days of all the year, and of all the world to come. Some day — this I surely believe — the Wise Men and the shepherds, the high and the humble, both together having become men, shall rise and say to Herod, ‘Stop! Though we be massacred for our courage or crucified for it, Stop! Year by year we have witnessed the Christmas hope climb the black sky; year by year we have heard a promise chanted from God’s heaven; year by year a holy child has been laid in the sordid manger of our hearts, until at last we have risen in the invincible power of our own kindness. We cry to all the war-men of this shrieking planet, Stop! We declare that henceforth all babies shall be born and shall grow in safety. Who knows but that each one of them is a little child of God born to write his own message of valiant mercy upon the climbing scroll of human history!’

Christmas shall come true! Look! Even now once again it climbs the midnight sky, his star in the East!