2001 December, Wrecsam People, The Fifth King

Christmas Issue

The Diocescan Congress was all about evangelization. We spoke of what older cultures have to give us. Here is a reflection on what we have to give older cultures.

The Passage of the Fifth King

In the land Economically Successful Islands in the East from which I set out [I might as well here admit that you call my home Japan] the compass has four points. In the south, across the open sea, is the Red Phoenix. It amazes me that even in the strange lands through which I have passed the Phoenix is well known, though none of us have seen it. The east point of the compass is the Blue Dragon, our continental neighbour. To the north, to the Black Turtle, we do not go. But for the West, the White Tiger, we feel a permanent fascination. Not a holy fascination. In my cosmography Heaven and the Mountain of the gods and the Isle of the Blest (in so far as they can be said to exist) are out amidst the Red Phoenix. But the land of youth is in the White Tiger.

I am a middling sort of magician, and not more than middle-aged, but the farther west I go, the older I feel. For we are an old people and our culture is old; old enough for us to write commentaries on the commentary on the Great Commentary. Commentaries are a certain sign that you are old and that your civilization is dying from within.

Initially, I was not following a star - I was escaping from a fossil. My desire to reach a land where people are still young was less urgent than my wish to flee from the necropolis of wisdom. I am not sure, incidentally, that I saw a star, as I said. I am only a minor magician. There may have been stars to see, but I was looking for one in a mirror.

I set out with my reluctant, bemused servants, on imported Mongolian ponies, and we crossed many countries, most of them uncomfortable, none of them clean. I had not known that there was so much peeling paint on the earth. Jungles I find oppressive, and deserts, though magnificent in their monotony, pall rapidly.

It was at the end of the last desert that I came across the Shepherd with One Sheep. He wore an unkempt beard and his sheep smelt opprobriously of wool.
The other shepherd

We sat in his cave in the light of the oil lamp, the One Sheep at his feet.

“In the beginning,” he began, “all humanity was equal. They were all children of the first parents. They recognized God intuitively from sticks and stones - from his presence in things created. They recognized him within themselves in the voice of conscience. This, all men had - and still have. But God became selective. He chose one man. We shall call him Abraham (most people do). Above the sticks and the stones and the voice of conscience, God spoke to him. Of Abraham’s sons, God chose one son and to the sons of the son of that son, he continued to speak - not in the voice of conscience, but in the voice of Revelation. God created a community of faith and poured creative power into it. Their virtues and their sins became magnified and multiplied but their culture was alive with the living stream of God’s grace. Therefore, one might say, we are alive and you are, in principle, dead. Since the choice of Abraham nothing ‘new’ has come into your culture. You have the sticks and stones and the voice of conscience and all that can be built on them - railways and computers and Noh plays and microchip processors and bonsai and Bunraku and biochemical engineering. But you do not touch the singing, shrieking, living stream of grace that is God’s Revelation. The Maitreya will not appear for you at Lourdes indicating fountains of healing; even your Future Buddha is in the past with your ancestors. You are old with the oldness of the world. We are young with the childhood of God.”
“Well,” I said, “I didn’t need to travel all this way to discover that.”
“No,” he said, “you have travelled here to join yourself to that youth and childhood, so as to be ancient no more. We, the spiritual and actual descendants of Abraham, are coming to the end of twenty centuries. We deceive ourselves that we are getting old, we write Commentaries, we neglect our gift, we barter our birthright for a mess of microchips, we are become timid and fall down in servile fear before the Old Cultures. We are criminally unaware that we have the gift of their completion and resurrection.”
“Do those who have drunk the old wine want the new?” I asked. “Don’t we say that the old is better?”
“The old,” he said, smiling, “belong elsewhere.”

Then he took his lamp and I followed him down the winding passages of the caves, through great shrines of weeping stone and up into a straw strewn stable.

I felt myself to be a surprise. Now, I have not been a surprise for twenty centuries - especially to myself. I looked at the Child, and I thought seriously of all that an old culture has to offer. I thought of the music of the Shakuhachi that is full of memory and moves my heart. Yet to a stranger, it is a strange thing. I thought of stones in the sand, of the memorial beauty of ritual and order and life and honour and dignity and my wife in a black silk kimono bowing to the ground as she offers me the evening rice. I sighed, it was only a little sigh, but it disturbed the Child and it opened its eyes and looked at me.

So now you must not be surprised if I never go home again. Everywhere now, is an exile - and everywhere is truly home.