Happy New Year! Did you know 2025 is the square of the sum of the numbers 1 to 9? (This also implies that it is the sum of the first nine cubes – the proof is left as an exercise for the reader.) I’ve been entertaining my classes with this fact, and they have wept tears of excitement at the thought of living through such a milestone. Being a maths teacher is pretty good, and life in general – if I am permitted to say so – is pretty good. I love my church, I enjoy my work, I’ve got my own house. And yet, assuming you’re not a large language model and you have some understanding of the workings of the human heart, you’ll know this doesn’t mean everything is tickety-boo. That lush, lush grass on the other side of the fence always looks ever so nice.
The new year brings an intensity to such feelings, with its grand promise of change. I celebrated Epiphany with my vicar’s family and some friends, and mingled with a real sense of peace and belonging was a bubbling restlessness. Much as I yearn to be rooted in a place, as soon as I begin to achieve this I want to throw everything up in the air and start afresh. I want to meet travellers in antique lands, I want to fill the unforgiving minute, I want to ride well and boldly into the jaws of Death. Yes, it’s daft – dafter if you know me – but is there a man alive who has never felt the same?
And it is there, there in the drama and the mystery of Epiphany. This is the remembrance of a great adventure into the unknown. During our celebration we read Malcolm Guite’s Sonnet of Epiphany, where he says of the wise men that ‘their courage gives our questing hearts a voice’. And think of the journey of T. S. Eliot’s Magi:
‘… Three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins’
The richness of the symbolism belongs to an other-worldly realm, such that the journey becomes for the travellers a kind of death.
It is here that our restless hearts find rest. Not firstly in the quest of men, for that is not what Epiphany is firstly about, but in the quest of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the morning star who came into a dark sky, far from the summer palaces. He came to his own, and his own did not receive him, so he made himself known to strangers from far off. He walked the long, hard way to a hill with three trees, where hands diced for a prize, and blood flowed from an empty wine-skin.
We may join him in his quest, dying with him and looking for the dawn when the white horse shall return and the stream shall flow through the meadow. Here is strangeness, here is endeavour. We might not do wrong by traveling the world looking for thrills, but until our questing hearts join the great Adventurer of our faith, we shall find no rest.
The Second Discourseman
The Four Discoursemen 