A Different Road Home

Yesterday was The Feast of the Epiphany, the day we remember the Magi, wise ones who followed a star to the Christ child. Just as they marveled at the revelation of God’s light in the world, Epiphany begins a season inviting us into wonder and awe.

After offering their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the Gospel tells us, “they left for their own country by another road” (Matthew 2:12). The Magi don’t go back the way they came. They don’t return to Herod with information, as he’d requested. We don’t know what happened to the Magi after they left Bethlehem, but we know they went home by a different way. We know they didn’t leave unchanged.

That’s what encountering Christ does: it changes your direction.

Writers and poets have picked up this image to describe spiritual transformation – the idea that we, too, leave Christmas changed. Not only in the big ways, but also in the quiet decisions that shape our days: how we speak, how we listen, how we love.

T.S. Eliot imagines this moment in his poem Journey of the Magi, told in the voice of one of the travelers, now old. He remembers the journey as exhausting, full of hardship and uncertainty. When they arrived, it wasn’t what he expected and he was not the same.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again

…

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

So as the lights of Epiphany dim and we step back into ordinary time, consider: What road are you walking now? Has something in you shifted? Are there new ways to move through the world – a fresh route of kindness, or justice, or grace?

The Christ child has been revealed. The journey continues.

May we, too, go home by another way – not just altered in direction, but in heart.