We couldn’t find the remote to get my son’s television working. I went on line and found one at Argos. Even though it was late afternoon, it would be delivered the next day. I chose the morning slot and, at 7.0 am the next morning, there it was outside our flat door.
Modern life is lived at speed. We are encouraged to “want it now”. I couldn’t say to Argos, “Take your time. The next couple of days will be fine.” And it’s not just in the delivery of goods that we are encouraged to hurry. Many people will have made New Year resolutions and will want to see tangible outcomes as soon as possible.
You can deliver goods quickly, but most of life is a “process”, a journey. Sometimes it flows, sometimes it stalls. Our spiritual journey is particularly like that. It’s a lifetime of travel. Encouraged by the speed of life around us, we can become impatient for enlightenment.
We have just celebrated the coming of the Kings to Bethlehem to visit the Christ Child. On Christmas cards they are depicted in all their finery crossing the desert. An idealised picture. In The Journey of the Magi, T.S.Eliot, depicts it more as a long, slow slog with plenty of challenges on the way:
“'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'”He goes on to describe just how hard the journey was, till they dropped down into a temperate valley and found the baby. But the journey, the spiritual journey, is not finished. It continues even when they return home, deeply altered by their experience:
“We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.”Chris Dawson