The epiphany

wordsout by godfrey rust
Magi < 4 of 4 < christmas >

The epiphany

A stable's a good place for revelations.
Some of the most profound discoveries
are made in back rooms, half by accident,
by people half-exhausted, looking for something else.
Just as we felt like giving up,
when the whole thing had become ridiculous
and had gone on much too long, and we were blaming
everybody else for our mistakes,
we came upon the unexpected answer
in the most unlikely place:
a speechless, thoughtless, helpless child
who just lay there, needing to be loved.
In this subversion of all natural things
was born the enabling power of sacrifice—
a being whose ambition was to seek
its own destruction, and then call upon
his followers to do no more or less.
What kind of way was this to rule a world?
He just lay there, needing to be loved.
It must be stopped: each Herod would conspire
to kill it when it cannot be tempted
with possessions or subdued with pain,
or lulled to sleep with alcohol or television.
Here was something we could not buy or cure,
digitise, transplant, upgrade, invest in,
analyse or write a business plan for.
He had no army, text-book, voters' mandate
or computer markup language
with which to implement his great design:
he just lay there, needing to be loved.
It was the most implausible demand.
Anything else we might negotiate
but not this life of grace secured through death:
grace, born out of deprivation,
grace born of the endurance of the oppressed,
grace born of the hardships of the poor,
grace born of the forgiveness of the intolerable,
grace borne in the dignity of silence, grace born
from incomprehensible submission
to the absolute abuse of power.
In the strength of his weakness
he just lay there, needing to be loved.
Aeons after energy exploded into matter
here in this stable was let loose
the yet more potent power of perfect love,
shedding the fabric of his former life
like an old coat, reckless that the truth
would prove for all he knew fatal
to everything to which he had thus far clung.
Our gifts were tokens. There was nothing more to do
but leave the child to his own terrible story,
and return by different routes
to our own countries, strangers to us now,
yet seeing them as if for the first time,
how they just lie there, needing to be loved.

The last of four poems in the sequence Magi. If the poem is being read on its own rather than as part of the sequence it may be better to omit the four lines near the end from "shedding the fabric.." to "...thus far clung." as these are intentionally echoing lines from the first poem The Seekers.