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Posted on 01 January 2008
Wise Blogger Sue Wallace said:

Christmas meditation

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Christmas is a time of travelling. Of slippery roads and trips to far flung relatives, of cheering in the New Year and hobbling back home from hearing the bells in the city square with skinned heels, making a resolution never to buy another pair of 'those' shoes again.

And it's also a time for remembering other travellers. The girl who had a baby and the strange travellers from far flung lands who followed a star, not really knowing where it would lead them. This story/meditation is the product of me musing about what it must have been like ...

Imagine. Imagine that you are a traveller. You have come a very long way. All the way from Africa, carrying a small quantity of precious, fragrant burning resin. You have ridden for hundreds of miles on horseback till your thighs are aching and sore, you have travelled on foot too, till your back aches and your feet throb. Sometimes the territory was a little too forbidding or a little too steep to stay mounted. You are now in a strange country, and here it is night, and the nights are cold.

For as you began to climb higher into the hills, the temperature began to drop. It feels like you are on the roof of the world here and although it is pleasantly warm at noon, at night it is much colder than you have ever known it. There is frost on the ground. You have heard tales of this white powder that covers the sand where the dew has dropped, but no one has ever told you what it felt like before.

- how it bites at your fingers,
- how the cold wind cuts into your face.
- how your knees ache with the cold in the middle of the night with only a flimsy tent to protect you.

You wrap your thick, woollen travelling cloak tighter around you and you look for the place you are searching for. You feel scared and lost. Very lost. Although you have travelling companions and a servant nearby, you know how vulnerable you are in a strange place, with different customs, and this place is under military rule. Armies have been marching past you at regular intervals on the journey.

You hear jeers and shouts from cohorts of passing troops at times, and the fear is always at the back of you and your companion's minds. What if they turned on us? We could never fight against them, there are too many of them. But so far, they never have turned on you. Their commanding officers reined them in, and told them to march faster. They disappeared over the horizon, the soles of their boots drumming rhythmically into the road.

The fear stayed, deep-down though. And the despair too and the tiny voice inside telling you that you must be crazy for leaving everything you know behind you, just to search. Because you are searching - looking for a new born king. Looking for some answers in life too.

The obvious place to look for a king is in a palace. But the only palace near this place had no children crying in it. It contained only a bad tempered ruler, who you were afraid would murder you on the spot, and a few local priests of the ancient and complex religion they follow in these parts. These holy men directed you six miles to the South. But you aren’t really sure who you can trust. The king who asks you to report back to him with the cold steel of a threat in his voice, or the priests who consult their ancient scriptures and give the name of a tiny hamlet miles away from anywhere important.

Your confusion mounts... and the black pit of fear in your stomach. Was this long journey all for nothing?

And now you reach the village. Someone has scrawled the name of the place on a wooden post near a watering trough. The place is riddled with caves, like a giant anthill. And you begin to wonder where on earth you should be looking next. But then you gaze into the sky, and as you gaze the starlight seems to crystallize through the freezing air, pointing the way to one cave in particular, with an old family home leaning crookedly against it, like the cave has become the spare room or the granny flat for the unwanted guests and the pet goat.

It is about as far removed from a palace as you could wish. Deeply, deeply ordinary. Yet something inside you makes you want to look further. You lift the latch. And smell, not goat dung, but something animal all the same, a cow, and the remains of whatever the cow had for breakfast. The ripe smell makes you cover your face at first.

But then you look around. And see a scrubbed corner. And in the scrubbed corner a woman is lying on a pile of straw. She is pale, as if she has been bleeding. She looks as if she has recently been through a great ordeal. And then you see the man. He is much older than her, and he is busy propping the woman up with piles of straw and trying to persuade her to drink some wine from a goatskin he is holding.

You hail him in your native tongue. He looks puzzled. You remember just how far you are from home so you try again, this time in the rough traders Greek you have picked up over the years. This time he replies, falteringly, trying to find some words. “Hail stranger, come in.”

You ask. “I have come from far away. I am looking for a baby king.”

He points to a feeding trough, which puzzles you at first. Perhaps he is offering food for the horses. Then you peer inside and you are shocked.

A baby. He is lying, newborn by the looks of him, too purple and wrinkled to be any older than a few hours, tiny and fragile, wrapped in bands of cloth that are wound around and around, as the Egyptians do with their princes before they bury them. You stare straight into the baby’s eyes, and the baby seems to stare at you, in an unfocused kind of way. You move closer, so you can see each other more clearly. You feel moved to talk to this child. What do you say?

Then the baby seems to want to communicate back. Not in speech, for he has no speech as yet, but in the way that he looks, his position.

His eyes bore a message into your soul. What does he seem to be saying to you...

You feel compelled to give the child a gift. You have brought frankincense from your home country for him, but you also want to give him something else. What gift do you want to give him now, a personal gift between you and him that no one else can see...

Your companions come in too. They also pay their respects and give their gifts, and then you leave, after a brief conversation, filled with the halting phrases caused by the language barrier and both your lack of vocab. You are aware that something tremendously important has passed, but you are also aware that it will take time to process this. You sit and think for a while, about what this can all mean, about the next step...

And then you hear singing - strange, ghostly music that seems to come from the clouds and the frosty air itself. It sounds like the cross between a song of joy and a lullaby...