What the Wise Men Forgot

By Quinn Chipley

Luke 1:41-42And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”

I was a conservative child with a stubborn aesthetic. When the Sears Christmas catalog came, I was struck more starry-eyed over the lights and ornaments than by the toys and candy. The Christmas colors in my palette matched a fantasy shaped by Alps and fjords: Spruce greens, holly-berry reds, midnight blues, and snowy whites. I dismissed the faux boxwood wreaths -- stuck with the travesties of lemons, oranges, and grapes -- as the peculiar error of miscreants. These Della Robbia dalliances kept too-close-company with that lady who floats with her infant in a vaporous shell of robin-egg blue. Some folks just cannot keep Christmas and Easter crayons properly apart.

But here it is in Luke. “Blessed is the fruit.” Fruit must ripen. It cannot be rushed. I too can grow.

Prayer:

“All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This.” --- T.S. Eliot, The Journey of the Magi

What the Wise Men Forgot

After all that taxing travel, for her

to find no inn at the end of the trail

in labor, left-hand kneading doughy ankles,

the right cupping a spine skewered on pain,

she surely must have welcomed that last turn