Christian Viewpoint: 'We come perplexed and confused, struggling with doubts and questions'
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I LOVE the words my friend Iain posted on Facebook exactly a year ago beside a photo of the three wise men in his church’s nativity scene, writes John Dempster.
His post marked Epiphany – January 6 – when we remember the Magi’s arrival to pay homage to baby Jesus.
Iain was quoting from Evelyn Waugh’s 1950 novel Helena, a sometimes satirical imagining of what St Helena’s life might have been like. British born, she was mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great under whose rule the Empire became Christian.
According to legend, Helena travelled to Jerusalem in old age and rediscovered the cross on which Jesus had been crucified three centuries earlier.
In Waugh’s version, she’d been perplexed by the range of beliefs competing for the people’s attention. The old stories of cantankerous Roman deities, the Cult of Mithras, the unfathomable beliefs of the Gnostics. “So many gods, more every day,” Helena said. “No one could believe in them all.”
Helena “was troubled always with the suspicion that there was still something to be sought which she had not yet found”. She longed for a faith based on evidence, not on fanciful stories and obscure reasoning.
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She discovered that Christian faith is rooted in a historical individual. You could see where he was born, where he died, where he was buried. You could read accounts based on eyewitness testimony. You could search for the very cross he hung on.
And so Helena, believing that this Jesus was resurrected and alive, rendering obsolete all other faiths, became a Christian “Privately and humbly, like thousands of others, she stepped down into the font, and emerged a new woman”.
While in Jerusalem, she attended an Epiphany service at the Shrine of the Nativity. Three monks, representing the Magi, knelt at the altar.
Then came the moving words Iain quoted as Helena realised that she, like them, was a far-travelled seeker. “This is my day, and they are my kind”.
These travellers arrived in Bethlehem late – long after the cattle, the shepherds, the angels. They delayed at the Palace. They brought strange gifts.
Like Helena, many of us see ourselves in these Magi. We come long after the event. We come perplexed and confused, struggling with doubts and questions. We come, some of us, with our mental health issues. We come long after the childlike in faith are already kneeling.
Helena recognised that what she said of the Magi was true of her also: “Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too found room before the manger.”
And as I come, conscious of all my baggage, I know that I too will be accepted, that there is kneeling room for me also.
