When the world is falling apart in this season we tend to wonder, “If Christmas happened, why is evil tearing things up now?” The idea is that we had a lot of problems, but then the Messiah was born to fix everything. But that was two-thousand years ago and we seem to be in worse condition with fascists dismantling America and killing people in the streets.
I assumed in the 1960’s that by the time I would get to my older years we would have made a lot more progress than this.
Jesus’ birth and life was a major revelation, and we like to think that he brought everything to a satisfactory conclusion. “Yep, it’s all wrapped up and we’re going to heaven.”
My Short Art Film “Watch for the Signs” is about the Magi’s journey still continuing. They took radical risk to go searching for the One, but afterwards realized life and history did not stop at that nativity. They had many more miles to travel and on their death beds, they might have asked the same question we do, “I wonder what happened with that little baby, and wasn’t he supposed to be changing the world for the Good?”
Many have conveniently forgotten how Jesus clearly commissioned his followers to go into all the world acting in love as the awakening light. He did not say, “The world is finished now. Go ahead and abuse it while you wait around for me to come back and evacuate you.” He knew humanity’s evolution takes more than a lifetime and more than one individual.
Somebody took it upon themselves to conclude the story when they should have been carrying their gifts into the unknown like the Magi. This film is about moving ahead in God’s will toward our fulfillment known only to God. It calls us, now many, to be today’s Magi believing we are members of something bigger than ourselves and carrying our gifts of light into this current darkness.
(see other Short Art Films at https://horizongate.org/short-art-films)
Here is the text of the poem in the film:
Watch for the signs,
Gifts inserted
From outside space time;
Search like the Magi
Studied star charts.
The Spirit massages
Your capacities to journey
And follow the inkling
Of an idea that has yet no name;
New language forms to express it.
Seek in your obscurity
Like the girl in the unknown village
Pregnant against the law in a man’s world
And her loyal husband packing before sunrise
To run as aliens from genocide.
Atrocities raged by will of position;
A baby breathed every day somewhere
And was carried back to the village
To follow the woodworker’s craft,
Grew to be loved by the unknowns.
When would his new creation unveil?
Year after year, household and neighbor,
We thought he would become more,
Were watching for signs,
Wishing for newness.
We thought in a lifetime
The change would be accomplished,
The spark would grow refining fire.
But still a star leads
In uncharted space.
Formation takes longer
Than the sense of a beyond
Stepping out increments,
Carrying our offerings
Toward the hopeful destination.
Watching from over there
The Magi attend our progress,
The constellations of signs
Reaching forward in the dark
With gifts traveling afar.
©Mark R. Turner
January 7, 2025
Athens, Alabama
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