BVM (Mid-week Message)

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

August 10, 2016

BVM

August 15 in the calendar of the Episcopal Church is the “Feast of St. Mary the Virgin, Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  The date comes from the western (Roman) Church’s commemoration on that day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  The Anglican tradition has generally considered this Roman doctrine that Mary at the end of her life was translated directly into heaven without suffering death as one of the adiaphora (an indifferent doctrine or practice, i.e., one not forbidden, but also not required). In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, August 15 is the feast of the Dormition (the “falling asleep” or death) of the Theotokos (the God Bearer).  Similarly, in the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Scottish Episcopal Church calendars, it is called the Feast of the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In some ways, Christian teaching about the Blessed Virgin has always served as a “fence around the law,” a peripheral teaching protecting the more central and deeper doctrines of the full divinity and humanity of our Lord. 

On the occasion of this Marian feast, I share with you the following poem by William Butler Yeats. 

The Mother Of God

The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.

Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart's blood stop
Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones

And bids my hair stand up?

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+