"SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM"

 “SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM”

     Christmastide ended in the West on Saturday, January 6, a date which the church has traditionally named as Epiphany, to celebrate the arrival of the magi to worship the baby Jesus.  That story in Matthew 2 is filled with intrigue and slyness and violence.  The magi arrive in Jerusalem, announcing (undiplomatically) to King Herod that they are searching for the baby born to be king of the Jewish people.  Herod is greatly troubled but gets advice from his prophets that the baby is to be born in Bethlehem.  He tells the magi that he wants to worship the baby too, and he asks that they inform him where the baby is, so that he can come and pay homage.  The magi have eyes to see and hearts to discern, however, so they return home by another way after they have found Jesus.

    Herod is infuriated at this slight and at his lack of intelligence gathering, so he sends soldiers to slaughter the boys of Bethlehem.  In the meantime, Joseph has also had a vision and has taken his family to Egypt to escape the carnage, much as many other Palestinian families are now seeking to do in the midst of the Israeli bombardment.  The Christmas story doesn’t end on a sweet, sentimental note – it ends with the slaughter of the baby boys of Bethlehem – this story lives in the same world that we do.

      I’m grateful to be alive and in relatively good health as we begin this new year of 2024.  We had a great visit with Susan and with David and his family over the holidays.  Susan has returned to Baltimore, with David and Erin going back to Salt Lake City.  Emma will spend this semester abroad in Paris (tough duty), and Zoe is a senior at Interlochen Arts Academy.  So, I have plenty to give me an attitude of gratitude, but I’m also feeling anxious and depressed about 2024, with its political campaigns and its elections.  I wish that President Biden had decided not to run for a second term – he has had a great presidency, but he seems frailer by the day.  And the Trumpster is looming – he is a scary man, and with Biden’s frailty, there is a distinct possibility that he could win the Presidency. I’m still holding out a faint hope that Biden will recognize the error of his decision and step down to allow the next generation to step up.  

    I’m beginning to think that this year is resembling 1968, when Lyndon Johnson’s presidency collapsed early that year, and he announced in March that he would not run for re-election that year.  That opened up a maelstrom of craziness and chaos and violence, with Martin Luther King Jr being assassinated on April 4, and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy being assassinated two months later.  It ended up with Richard Nixon being elected President.  I was a young man then – indeed it was my first year to vote.  Because I felt that the Democrats had cheated Eugene McCarthy out of the nomination and because of the police violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago that year, I joined thousands of other young people who decided not to vote, thus giving the election to Nixon.  

    Although I have seen the error of my ways, I fear that the same thing may happen this year with this generation of young people.  I hope that I am wrong, but I have this growing feeling that this may be a disastrous year for our country, and that puts me in the mood to hear and think about William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” written in 1919 at the end of World War 1, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, in the midst of a growing crisis in Europe, and as Red Summer was growing in America.  His poem catches my mood at the beginning of this new year, so I’ll close with it:

“The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?