Fr Ben Garren

Dear Siblings in Christ,

One useful spiritual practice is to read a passage of scripture and imagine it coming to life. We can read between the lines and fill it up with details to make the story more real. We can make the characters come alive by giving them a full backstory and a completion to their story.

This was a pattern of biblical reflection in use within Jewish communities centuries before Jesus was born. Within the tradition of English Christianity few figures have been more fleshed out as characters than Joseph of Arimathea, who in the Gospels is simply the wealthy man who is willing to give his newly hewn empty family tomb to be the resting place of Jesus of Nazareth.

In the medieval ages, with Jerusalem far away and inaccessible to them, the people of Glastonbury dreamed. They knew old Roman tin mines dotted their land and asked, what if Joseph got his wealth by being a tin merchant… it was a connection between where they were and the Gospels. The idea was that this person who had been caught up in Jesus’ life had walked the same paths they walked daily.

From there the legend grew to, perhaps, Joseph being an uncle to Jesus offering to lay his body to rest in his own family tomb. And if Joseph was Jesus’ uncle could he not have brought Jesus with him on some merchant journey to their tin mines… could Jesus and perhaps Mary have walked the fields of Glastonbury? If all this had happened, if Joseph loved Glastonbury that much would he not have traveled there with word of the resurrection, and in so doing maybe have brought with him the chalice used at the last supper, the Holy Grail, with him?

I share this with you not to advance a search for the Holy Grail across the fields of southern England… but to ask if you have ever taken the time to weave so expansive a narrative to connect yourself in some way to a character in the Biblical narrative. My request for you this day, or perhaps over the next few days, is to consider a more minor character in the bible and craft an entire greater narrative for their life.

This narrative will be no more plausible than the legends that developed in Glastonbury, but it may very well teach you something about what you are longing for amidst your life of faith, what you need to bring to God in prayer, and start seeing how each person in the Bible narrative is someone we know only the smallest things about.

Pax,

—Ben