Fr Ben Garren

Dear Siblings in Christ,

A reasonable faith is not quite the same as a rational faith. We can go about a generally reasonable life and have it marked by a variety of irrational factors. Spending hours on a hobby we may always be amateurish at may be irrational but it may also be quite reasonable as we engage a full life marked with enjoyment. Over the past few centuries there has been an expectation to make our faith lives one that adhere to strict rational science, which has at points made faith a little less full and a little less enjoyable.

On this, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or as our BCP considers it St Mary, the Virgin, the question of how our prioritizing of strict rational science over a life rich with art, poetry, and meaning has overwhelmed our faith. There are the various, at points conflicting, New Testament accounts of Mary the Mother of Jesus. There are the ways we can place Mary into the context of a young Jewish woman living under the Roman Empire at the time of the Herodians. Then there is the life of Mary from her immaculate conception to assumption crafted over generations by mystics and artists of the church... which many label irrational.

What I want to suggest is that it is reasonable to include the work of mystics and artists in our lives of faith. It is reasonable to engage the sequence of stories crafted by such within Christianity over the past 2000 years. And that today is a day to welcome the reasonable to our lives in a way that may not be quite rational.

So today, on the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, make some space for something irrational to enter your faith life. Our relationship to Mary within scripture begins with her irrational decision to trust an Angel that she would bare the Son of God... it is a good day to let a little of the poetry beyond human rationality and logic be part of our lives.

Pax,

—Ben