In the sermon about Mary's visit to her cousin Elisabeth, our visiting priest The Reverend Melanie Rowell remembered her evangelical family's scorn for veneration of Mary, and she quoted article XXII of the Episcopal Church's Articles of Religion (1801) "The Romish Doctrine concerning ... Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God" (BCP 868). But a Roman Catholic boyfriend opened her to another way of looking at Mary. First, the young woman was obedient and accepting of God in a way that few of us could be, despite her doubts. When Elisabeth greets her as "Mother of our Lord," Mary deflects the attention to God: "My soul magnifies the Lord." While veneration of Mary may seem like a relic of Medieval hierarchical thinking -- i.e., Mary was an intermediary to the Throne of Heaven -- Mary can still offer way for us to appreciate God from another angle.
For Ascension Day, the previous evening, The Reverend Daron Vroon admitted that he himself has had trouble understanding why we should care about this feast day tucked away, always on a Thursday, 40 days after Easter. So Jesus waves good - bye, his work done, and he'll see us later: Fr. Daron asked, what's to celebrate about his going away? One answer lies in understanding a medieval concept of humanity as being created in "the image of God."
To the Medieval mind, we humans are not individuals, but different persons within one nature, a concept I've heard only in relation to the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct "persons" and yet One God. Protestant and American, I've not heard this challenge to individuality before, but it's right there in article IX of the Articles of Faith, "Of Original or Birth - Sin" (869), presented as emphatically not an inheritance from Adam's fall "as the Pelagians do vainly talk," but a "corruption of the Nature of every man ... engendered in the offspring of Adam." I suppose Articles might be revised to say, "Corruption is in the DNA of our species."
According to Fr. Daron, the Incarnation of Jesus regenerated our "nature," undoing that corruption. Very early in Church history, Leo the Great preached the same concept on Ascension Day (Sermon 73). On that day, Leo preached,
...the Nature of mankind went up, to pass above the angels’ ranks and to rise beyond the archangels’ heights, and to have Its uplifting limited by no elevation until, received to sit with the Eternal Father, It should be associated on the throne with His glory, to Whose Nature It was united in the Son. [So] Christ’s Ascension is our uplifting....
I know from reading (and loving) other Medieval authors that they saw an open border between physical object and moral imagination. Fr. Daron assured us, however, that the idea that we humans are linked through Christ's nature is "not metaphorical, but metaphysical."
I've been thinking about my long - unquestioned acceptance of American "rugged individualism" because of religious writings that cast doubt on that outlook, and an opposing article by George Will, a conservative I've long admired, in which he decries liberal assaults on individualism. I'll have to keep thinking and blogging about this.
- Blog reflections of Related interest
- "Ascension Day: Up to Us" (05/13/2017)
- "Jesus Ascended: Then What?"(06/05/2014)
- "The Annunciation [a painting] by Tanner Awakens Advent Thoughts" (12/06/2014)
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