The Journey of the Magi

I'm busy preparing a sermon on the Epiphany of the Lord, which is the story of the wise men from the East who visit Jesus after his birth. Christians celebrate this event on January 6, also known as the Twelfth Day of Christmas.

[Update: You can listen to the sermon online at the Artisan website.]

Here is a beautiful poem by T.S. Eliot called "The Journey of the Magi," which Eliot wrote about his own journey from agnosticism to faith around the time of his baptism and acceptance into the Anglican Church in 1927. I especially love the last four lines of the first stanza and the entire third stanza. Enjoy!

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory

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.

Gift card tango

Whenever we are thinking about buying a thank you gift for someone at Artisan, we always go with a Wegmans gift card, for two reasons: first, who can't use a little grocery money? Second, and more importantly, we know that Wegmans has a gigantic carousel display of... gift cards. So with a $25.00 Wegmans gift card, you can go buy a $25.00 iTunes gift card, or a Home Depot gift card, or an Old Navy gift card, or heck, a plain old prepaid VISA card.

A friend of mine recently used a gift certificate to a local mall to get some gear at Guitar Center. He paid for the gear with grocery money, and then bought a VISA gift card (to use for groceries) using the mall gift certificate. Maybe he should have bought a Wegmans card instead...

This kind of thing amuses me. Any other creative gift card stories?

Playing a gig tonight

If you're from the Rochester area and you're not doing anything tonight, come on down to Leaf and Bean to hear a nice trio of musicians being musicians. If you've never heard any of my music, well... you're probably not missing all that much. But Dan and Nate (warning: links take you to MySpace) are both tremendously talented singer-songwriters.

Hope to see you there!

Pretty

Don't let the good looks fool you. She'll rip your heart out and stomp it into dust.