The Old Dispensation

January 3, 2021 by Amy Welborn

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
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.

Eliot, of course. The Journey of the Magi.

The goal of modern life is to be comfortable. To live comfortably, and, most importantly, to be comfortable with oneself. It’s even seeped into the modern pop Christian understanding of salvation, which is no longer about true conversion and casting aside the old person and letting God remake us, but simply accepting who we are, whatever that means. We are saved, it seems, from a sense of discomfort. We are saved when we are at ease with ourselves and at ease in the world.

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

The alternative is not anxiety and constant self-condemnation. The alternative is simply reality. This is not home and we are not finished, and therefore to ever decide we are completely at ease in the here and now, who we are and where we are, is to declare the journey over.

As I wrote last week, Christians stand, every day, in a place of tension. The Kingdom of God is within you. Emmanuel. And also: If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

There are all sorts of epiphanies startling us as we come to what we thought was the end of our journey and gather at the manger. The epiphany that we are loved into existence, not accidentally generated, the epiphany that our weakness is embraced by God himself, the epiphany that glory is not what we think, the epiphany that it is actually true.

And then the epiphany which is not a statement, but a question.

Now what?

Because it cannot be the same. That truth might grieve us at first but perhaps in time, we accept the unease, and we know that in the birth, there is death, and then, once again, there is birth, which is anything but comfortable.

From The Loyola Kids Book of Signs and Symbols. On the facing page, not reproduced here, there is a longer exploration of the symbols for older readers.