The final Christmas story is a crazy one: you start with an unspecified bunch of Zoroastrian priests. Said priests are subsequently led by a star to the birth of the Hebrew God in the backwater part of a backwater town. Is it a pious fiction, designed to emphasise Jesus’ role as the leader of an all-encompassing weltanschauung? Or might it be more deeply rooted in the historical? Though our protagonists were astrologers, modern astronomy has pointed to 0 AD as the possible date for a conjunction of Jupiter and Venus (fertile!), Halley’s Comet, or a supernova. The debate rages on.
In truth, these are the wrong questions: limitless evidence could come to light and it will still remain as unfalsifiable as it is unverifiable.
These figures saw a spiritual reality in an empirical appearance. They saw the transcendent within the immanent, the impossible in the possible. And don’t we all?
Driven by unrequited dreams, we live in their shadow. Constantly, we push and strive to turn the potential into the actual. Yet our lives are seldom realised in the manner we wish. Brimming with expectation, we push further into the unexpected, thinking we are an ‘in control’. And what’s it all for? Outside the physicalist paradigm, this inner controller neither knows where it’s really from, nor where it’s really going.
Throughout all this striving and questioning, we forget that we are at all. We see ourselves as a conductor tugging the strings, rather than the sum total of experience itself. But the magi saw through this façade. Our life is not ‘ours’ in the normal sense, it is given. Social realities are given, ancient wisdom, forward thinking – it’s all given to us. This is not to cast as the magi mere moths to a flame, but to understand that we can never be the objective-reference point we so wish to be. Most things, when examined enough, are unknowable givennesses.
In the Christian calendar, this end of Christmas marks the wait for the death of God and the subsequent immortality of humankind in God. It’s rife with contradiction, I hear you complain. How can something become eternal when once finite? Do we really want to live forever? How can I remain me without my haircut, my piercings, my frowns and smiles? In truth, I won’t try to feign objectivity here. But the story of the Christ captures the imagination because it claims unreservedly that there is something behind the veil, a truer truth, a deeper depth; that our separation is illusory, and one day, we will all return to the same One at cradle and cross.
