In light of the celebration of the Epiphany, I recall some reflections that have stayed with me and that I had the opportunity to share in a speech at the Venezuelan Academy of Language a little over a year ago. With some adaptations, I now share part of these brief lines that lead us to meditate on the return of the Magi to their place of origin after their visit to the manger in Bethlehem.

In environments where religion is viewed with prejudice, annoyance, strangeness, and even suspicion, it always seems worthwhile to examine ourselves to appreciate the particular, desired, and accepted burden of having a faith that yearns to be lived coherently in every aspect of life, sometimes even in adverse contexts prone to incomprehension. But the matter is even more complex because it must be added that for those who do not believe, it is impossible to imagine the experience of faith: it is a misguided starting point to try to think about or feel faith as if it were an additional piece of hypothetical circumstances to be considered in an analysis; such a presumption is nonsensical. For those who are believers, even if in a hidden way, faith is inevitably lived, despite doubts, ups and downs, occasional periods of estrangement or rebellion; the sparks of faith shine brightly and perhaps always seek to ignite the innermost being. The Venezuelan poet Armando Rojas Guardia astutely observes in one of his essay collections how “prayer is an untransferable experience (…) One would have to experience it—enjoy it, suffer it—to begin to decipher, even a little, the verbal codes that allude to it.” Even the most respectful and empathetic observer could hardly fully grasp life, faith, and its prayerful expression without that burning flame that makes this loving gaze possible. In the intellectual and even social exchange between these two very different positions, for the non-believer there is an insurmountable distance that prevents them from understanding this vital foundation of the person who aspires to be Christian, which often leads to a conventional choice of indifference or omission on the matter, perhaps resorting to quick or crude simplifications of incomprehensible reductionism. And it is true that a similar situation arises if a believer, lacking insight and even less judgment, hastily tends to generalize their view without due consideration for others who lack faith. How then can we foster a dialogue based on faith that yields fruitful results? In fragment 40 of his book The Kaleidoscope of Hermes (1989), Rojas Guardia records a similar concern, or rather, the effects of an inevitable experience in describing his own Christian conviction in the “dusty mass of daily life,” in the ordinary and the smallest things; although “invisible to inattentive eyes,” the “glory of God is revealed, / small, like a leaf, a simple breeze…” he tells us in his poem “God Is Small,” which he devoutly recites like a “kneeling psalm.” And this habitual flow consequently carries its weight in each act, without ecstatic or dazzling events, but, at the same time, he has to listen to the friendly, but repeated chorus, undoubtedly full of affection, “with the voices that sang in our ears, saying that / all that was madness.”In this last quote, I am following the Spanish version of lines from an “old poem” by T.S. Eliot (“The Journey of the Magi,” 1927), which recounts the distant memory of the mythical Magi who came from the East on their journey to Bethlehem and which takes as its starting point of inspiration the second chapter of the Gospel of Saint Matthew. Rojas Guardia, in his essay, tells us about the enjoyable rereading of this text and his identification with the “spiritual message” of those verses by the English-language writer, in which poetic imagination recreates the memory of the arduous journey across snowy desert roads, almost always in the darkness of night and not without obstacles and hostilities, and how the wise pilgrims from the East discover the truth of the Nativity, a revelation that completely transforms their existence. Rojas Guardia comments in his reading that, from then on, “the Nativity signified for them a daily dying, opaque, prolonged in time.” But the Magician who lends his voice to the poem does not lament, for he is constantly yearning for something different to the highest degree: the ever-desired fullness. And in that thirst for fullness, he thinks with joy and longing that perhaps he would repeat “another journey similar to that one, even at the cost of the suffering it would entail, or simply physical death, as definitive liberation, as the final and true birth.” Certainly, as a fruit of the testimonial journey and its illumination, that conversion, the metanoia, leads to seeing the things of the world in a completely different way: when the Magi returned to their Kingdoms, they no longer felt comfortable, “no longer at ease (…) in the old state of affairs” (“in the old dispensation”); they could not fit into the unshakeable inertia of conventional beliefs, of accustomed and even deified ways of seeing and thinking. Almost like a gloss inspired by the final verses of “The Journey of the Magi,” which resonate with echoes in his personal experience, our poet writes in his essay:

“And yet, faced with the multitude that walks the streets of an era that so absurdly represses the sacred; faced with so many friends who, at times, are strangers for being clinging to ‘their gods’ without knowing it, one chooses, chooses again, consciously, as the basic experience of one’s life, this solitary and uncomfortable adventure that is the bet on Jesus.”

We continue then in the adoration to which the Epiphany calls us, smiling with irrepressible joy, and also in that consequent commitment to which we are invited.