3rd Day of Christmas: Following the star.
On getting lost and Divine longing; some wise words by Hildegard, a song and a blessing.
Dear fellow pilgrim,
welcome to the third day of Christmas! It is the third day of our pilgrimage towards the Divine dwelling place - and I am already lost.
Like our little one from the back seat, I am calling with impatience: are we there yet? Where are we even going? Will there be ice cream at the end?
Friends, I am leading this pilgrimage now in the 8th year and I am always getting lost somewhere in between.
Confusion, says the great existential teacher Søren Kierkegaard, is the beginning of all insight. Which is a consolation of sorts.
So, I wondered out loud today at our lunch with a good friend, himself a scholar of religion. Is there a liturgical structure to the 12 days somewhere? Something to hold on to when we get lost? Like the star the wise men followed?
He thought this was a good question. And suggested I should give this question right back to you :-)
So dear fellow pilgrims, where are we heading? What are we searching for? And will there be ice cream at the end?
Have you been following a tradition or liturgical structure on your way to Epiphany or some other sort of spiritual path before? Or do you hope to find a path here?
I myself came to understand the 12 Days of Christmas as a movement of heart, a sort of birthing process, when we take the Christmas story to heart.
For my family in the little parish home somewhere at the end of the world (at least as rural East Germany felt to me back then) Christmas started with Holy Night and we kept our tree until Epiphany as well as the carol singing.
The carol singing actually came with the tree as we had real candles on our Christmas tree. Thus we lit the candles only when we gathered around the tree and sang until the last candle was flickering away.
For a pastor’s family Christmas was also the busiest time of the year. Just like for many of you.
Now, with the feast days over, and the buzz ending, where are we heading, dear one?
Pondering the star
As the story has it, when the wise (wo)men heard about the new born King, they went with haste on a long journey, not knowing their specific destination and only guided by a star.
A star?
Who goes on a journey this way?
Guided by a star, leaving everything behind (their conveniences at least!) not knowing where to go, not knowing when they will arrive, or even how they will get there.
Yesterday we got some help from the medieval Abbess Hildegard of Bingen. In her Christmas homilies, she invites us to translate the Christmas story into our heart's journey.
The three kings, says Hildegard, followed a star they have seen with the eyes of their "heart's knowledge," which is, as we learned yesterday, the gift of Divine birth.
But what about the star?
Though the Christmas star, made from metal, paper, straw, or plastic, hangs every where I haven’t really given it much thought.
Thus I was in utter need to go back to Hildegard.
As she does in her homilies1, she recites the Bible verse and then gives her interpretation:
And behold the star they had seen in the east went before them, coming all the way until it would rest over the place where the child was.
Which means for Hildegard:
The taste for the gifts of God they have seen with the eyes of knowledge preceding from Divinity went before them…
“What does that even mean?” I asked my husband handing him the little booklet with Hildegard’s homilies.
“It is not the gifts, it is the taste for them,” he said after reading the paragraph slowly.
“Like the longing?” I replied.
“Yes.”
Now, we have it, dear ones.
Our heart’s longing for the gifts of God is guiding the journey.
Tasting the Divine gifts is what is pulling us along. We do not yet know where we will arrive but we follow the Divine longing until it brings us home.
What are your heart’s longings for this journey, dear one?
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