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Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary -St. Mary, Our Blessed Lady Our Lady of Walsingham and knowledge of Marian devotion in general is one of the best kept secrets of the Church [of England] and indeed of Anglicanism in general.

As Anglicans we owe much to our Protestant heritage -correcting theological abuses and eliminating hurtful practices in the Church-; yet we also owe much to our earlier Catholic heritage. It provided the stability and cohesion needed for the first 1500 years of the Church’s existence, and still provides us with a focus of unity today in the midst of our disarray.

A major part of that Catholic heritage is our devotional life; and a major potion of Catholic devotional life centers around the Blessed Virgin Mary; yet devotion to the Mother of God is lacking in the Church, even seen as a Roman innovation on the faith and not something germane or worthwhile. Such is the legacy of the Protestant Reformation.

If we value our Tradition(1), though, we should honor the Blessed Virgin Mary; if we love Jesus our Lord, we should love our Lady, his mother; if we would reclaim the patience, humility and charity that is the birthright and mark of the Christian, we should do no better than to use her as our exemplar, for as His mother, she exemplified all these things and all the virtues in her Calling to be His mother.

The Eastern Fathers have a saying that in Jesus Christ God became man that man might become God -and call this the divination of man, or theosis. This is known in the West as sanctification -being made perfect in Jesus Christ. And this was all accomplished through Mary, through her saying “Yes!” to the will of God.

I believe that the Anglican Communion shares a unique identity with Mary, that of being a bridge between two sides of a river. Being a bridge means to link two places, objects, or concepts otherwise inaccessible to the other. Just as the Anglican Church is a bridge church between Protestantism and Catholicism, connecting two sides of Christianity together, so Mary is a bridge between our humanity and Christ’s divinity, being the bridge through which Christ crossed over to assume our humanity. As Christ is the bridge between God and man, so Mary is the bridge between Christ and the believer [man].

As Anglicanism strives to be this bridge for the Christian Churches, so Christ acts for us with God and Mary acts for us with Christ. This does not mean, though that we have to approach Christ through Mary, or that she is the way to Christ as Christ is the way to the Father. It is more of a metaphor, and like all metaphors, has its limits.(2) What it does mean is that as Christ is worthy of our adoration and our love both because He is God and because through His Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection, so Mary is equally worthy of veneration and our love because of her assent to the Incarnation and because of her love for our Redeemer. We love her who first loved Him.

Devotion to Mary, then should not be foreign to Christian faith and practice. While it is not essential to practice such devotion in order to believe in Christ, to be baptized or worship God, not to know Mary or the motherly concern she has for us here and now is to lead a life denuded of a great love God has for us and wishes to give us through His mother. Devotion should not be forced but should pour out as from a wellspirng. Devotion to Mary should be centered in Christ and the Incarnation, which is true of all authentic devotion. Mary always points away from herself and to Christ. In Icons depicting her and the Christ Child she is always depicted having Christ on her left arm and pointing to Him with her right, guiding our gaze, so to speak away from her and to her Son.

When we pray the Rosary and when we use other Marian devotions, we are not taking away from God the honor due Him alone, rather we are adding to it, adding our voice to Mary’s and hers to ours as we pray to the Father through the Son, in the power of the Spirit. And through our love of her, which stems from our love of Him, we find our love and devotion to Him strengthened all the more. Such has been the experience of generations of believers; though at the same time, not all Christians follow this way, and yet still live lives of Christian grace.

In recent years, among the numerous number of books written on Mary are 3 by Anglicans: John Macquuarrie’s Mary for all Christians (1987), Norman Pittinger’s Our Lady: the Mother of Jesus in Christian Faith and Practice (1996) and Allan Allchin’s The Joy of All Creation: an Anglican Meditation on the Place of Mary (1993). This last one especially shows how in every generation of Anglican thought from the Tudors and the Caroline Divines down to the twentieth century, there have been voices raised in praise of Mary. If, then, there is a place in our minds and in our theology for Mary, why not a place in our hearts and in our devotion?

Notes:

(1) “our Tradition”. Tradition is a catchall word that comes to us from Koine and Classical Greek, and means”that which is handed down”. We speak of Apostolic Tradition as the process of the handing down to subsequent generations the faith, teachings, and practice, of the Apostles and the witness of the first generation of believers in Christ Jesus.

There is, moreover,  a difference between a living Tradition, and an ossified, dead tradition, sometimes called the juxtaposition of Tradition and traditions. “Tradition” is the unbroken transmission of the faith of Jesus spoken anew to each generation; “traditions” are usually unthinking expressions of what ‘we have always done’, often held on to for no other reason than the comfort factor: “its what we have always done, and its good enough for me”.  Jesus faulted the Pharisees for relying too much on “traditions of the elders” and letting these ‘traditions’ corrupt the authentic Revelation of God that Tradition passes on.
(2) For instance, a critic of Marian devotion in attacking this metaphor could (rightly) point out that if Christ is the bridge between humanity and the Father (Divinity of the Father) and Mary is the bridge between us and Christ, then what is to prevent there being in turn a bridge between us and Mary, and so on ad infinitum, and to ask: what then, is the bridge between Mary and the believer, and why should not each link in this chain require a further bridge creating another Great Chain of Being as in Medieval days?

My answer is that yes, there does exist a bridge between Mary and the believe; and, that bridge between Mary and the believer is the heart, the seat of the soul. Beyond this, however, there is no bridge between the heart and the individual because the heart is the individual, along with the body and the spirit. However, we can extend the analogy further by saying that Man is the bridge between God and the rest of Creation, that we do make up a Great Chain of being, extending from God through the angels to humanity, the rest of the animal kingdoms, plant life, fungi, protists, bacteria, archae, and the inanimate elements that make up the universe, and back to God. The Great Chain of Being, then, is a metaphor for our interconnectedness, and our ultimate dependence on God. And Mary, like each of us individually, depends absolutely on God for her salvation.