How does Eliot explore how he finds meaning in life through religion in "The Journey of the Magi"?

In the
"Journey of the Magi," Eliot's narrator imagines what the journey was like for the
three magi who visited the infant Jesus soon after his birth in the New Testament book of
Matthew 2: 1-12.

The story recounted in Eliot's poem is told in the first
person voice of one of the magi. He first tells of how cold and miserable the journey was. The
three magi often regretted having embarked on it, and wished they had stayed in their
comfortable homes. They were charged high prices to stay in dirty villages, and they wondered if
it had been mistake to venture forth.

Finally they do come to a
"temperate" valley, where the weather is warmer. They find it
"satisfactory."

The religious message emerges primarily in the
third stanza. In the first two stanzas, the speaker uses the first person plural form,
"we," speaking for the feelings of all three of the magi. In the third stanza, he
sometimes moves to "I," suggesting that a religious conversion experience has
components that are highly personal and also components that are communal.

The speaker says in stanza three that he saw a birth but that it was also a death: the
death of his old way of living and thinking. He had thought birth and death were different, but
in witnessing this birththe birth of Jesushe and the other magi experienced the death of their
old outlooks on life. This was not so much a joyous event as a very difficult one. It was
painful for all three of the magi, he says:

Hard and
bitter agony for us

It was an agony like
"death" to witness Jesus and all that he represented to the world because it meant
they would no longer be the same people.

The magi return to their old
kingdoms but they have been transformed. This causes them to be "no longer at ease" in
their own cultures. They now feel alien in their homelands.

This speaks to a
common experience of people who have had genuine religious conversions. Suddenly, they
experience the whole world differently. What they had thought was most important suddenly comes
to seem insignificant. What had once seemed trivial now seems all important. Religious
conversion, Eliot is saying, is a painful process of death and rebirth, reached through
suffering and sacrifice, as symbolized by the cold, wearying journey of the magi. It not simply
an experience of joy, but an experience that demands a change so profound it feels like the
death.