Chaos and confusion

Tell me, are you feeling confused?

Even if, right this minute you are feeling intellectually comfortable and experiencing the benefits of some exceptional mental clarity, there will, you  must admit times when you have felt confused. Perhaps it has been those times when you have been confronted with trying to set, programme or simply operate the set top box or DVD. It might be right here right now at the complex and seemingly ever-changing sit-stand-kneel-stand-kneel-sit minuet of the Mass. It’s many people’s experience of High Church worship. Trying to work out the behaviour of other drivers is an exercise in sure and certain confusion: I’m confident that when Edward Lorenz dreamt up chaos theory he was behind the steering wheel at the time. Confusion can be a generational thing: perhaps you have been entirely baffled by the pleasure that can apparently be gained from weak tea, Nice biscuits and cricket; or conversely why the height of  youthful sartorial elegance was for a time epitomized by wearing one’s trousers low enough to display most of your underwear. With the best will in the world and the sharpest mental faculties, ev-er-y day, everyday life is confusing.

It could be that you are so fed up with the confusion of life that you have been attracted to the Church, that bedrock institution that comes complete with the certainty that can only come from knowing unshakably that you are right for 2000 odd years. In a fraught and tempestuous world it is not uncommon to find many a soul clinging barnacle-like to the Rock of Ages.  

It is true, Mother Church is indeed a purveyor of certainties: certain about God, certain of his providence, certain of his loving care for his children, certain of redemption through Jesus Christ. And yet, at the very same time, you will find that when it comes to matters of the divine, it is the person who quite clearly knows what they are doing, who has that calms assurance of the one in the know, who is in all likeliness the furthest away from God. Because God is perplexing, His ways inscrutable, His behaviour unpredictable. God moves, as the proverbial wisdom goes, in mysterious ways.

If God’s presence in our world was predictable, would the Egyptians have rushed onto the muddy channel in the Red Sea? Would the Israelites have made the golden calf while Moses was away yakking to his deity? Would Sarah have laughed at the notion that she would soon be knitting the baby booties in her nineties? Would the sisters of Lazarus have come running to almost berate Jesus over the death of their brother? The world of humans works in simple, predictable ways: pathways do not become submerged under the sea, idols make good worship, superannuated women do not become mothers, the dead stay dead.

So if you are in church and you are not feeling confused, well perhaps you should be. Searching for certainties, faith can turn out not to be about answers but questions.  Searching for predictability we find that God is almost akin to a quantum particle in his behaviour: we can never know quite what he will be doing until we look. Searching for stability we find ourselves asked to leave everything and leap into the unknown.

We are celebrating today our Patronal Festival, on the Birth of the Virgin Mary. This event is not strictly speaking scriptural, not even if you adhere to the Coptic canon of Biblical books, but even sola scriptura Protestants admit that Mary didn’t descend fully formed from Heaven and must thus have come into this world the normal, messier way. If you want to find the first chronological appearance of Mary in the Bible then you will be looking in the Gospel of Luke for what is called the Annunciation: the time the angel visits to Mary to tell her she’s going to become a mother. The festival is kept by Christians on the 25th of March,  precisely 9 months before Christmas Day: neither early nor late, heaven has a strict timetable. Though we get the Gospel reading a few times during Advent, usually the festival occurs in Lent and perhaps this why it we most often draw out of it the lesson of Mary’s obedience- Gabriel asks her to do what God wants and she says ‘yes’. If you are in the middle of a season majoring on our sinful disobedience it is only natural to focus on the second Eve who left the apple on the shelf. And although the symmetry of salvation is there- the pride and disobedience of Adam and Eve redeemed by the humility and obedience Jesus and Mary- I think it may profit us to put aside Mary’s obedience for a moment and instead look at an aspect of the story very much more in tune with our skeptical twenty-first century: Mary’s confusion. 

‘She was much perplexed by his words’ says the Gospel and that sounds like a sensible and sane reaction to me. How else could she have reacted? As the conversation with Gabriel continues, Mary makes her famous declaration ‘be it unto me according to your word’ and the angel departs.  At this point it is always tempting to turn the Blessed Virgin Mary into a plaster saint: denuded of spirit she can be portrayed in the most sentimental of representations as a serene, alabaster, limpid, yes-woman. This is almost an insult to the queen of saints, to the queen of heaven. Mary is a ‘type’ of the Church and indeed the Mother of it. Her serenity and obedience so rightly treasured by the faithful must surely be remembered alongside her perplexity; her confusion in the face of God’s working in her world alongside her obedience to his will. 

If the story starts here at the Annunciation with perplexity, it ends with yet more fitting symmetry at Easter in bewilderment. The immediate reactions of the disciples to the resurrection, like Mary’s reaction to Gabriel were confusion, at first fearful, then irrepressibly, ebulliently joyful.  What better place to leave our consideration of Mary today. 

So. Be confused. Be gloriously, joyously, befuddled.  Be perplexed. You are in the  very best of company.