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How can the Magi of Matthew 2—the Three Wise Men "bearing gifts" and "traversing afar"—help us understand faith and reason, giving and receiving, the nature of God, and how to be human? Drew Collins offers some new perspective on a familiar Christmas story.

Drew Collins reflects on the Magi of Matthew Chapter 2. These wise men from the east come to pay Jesus homage, but in so doing, they offer for us an outside perspective on the wonder and the weirdness of Christmas. They’ve been lauded through centuries of Christian theology for both their reason and their faith, but W.H. Auden’s treatment of their intentions in his beautiful Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being, brings into clearest brightest view why they followed the star, and offers us something to aspire to. Auden gives them the lines:

To discover how to be truthful now...

To discover how to be living now….

To discover how to be loving now...

To discover how to be human now …. Is the reason we follow this star.

And well, in that sense, we’re all magi. Trying to learn how to be human now.

"Matthew 2:1-12 asks us, in other words, to confront the possibility that those outside of our particular Christian communities might offer us new ways of understanding of who Jesus is, while at the same time revealing new insights into the identities of our non-Christian neighbors.”

"The Christian faith affirms that God is a gift giver. We can say more. For God’s giving is so radical, so total, that even in God’s receiving the gifts we bring, however paltry and imperfect, God is also giving. In receiving the gifts of the Magi, or in affirming our receiving of them on God’s behalf, God is giving us hope that our own lives, scruffy and flawed though they might be, might be received by others as giving, like the Magi, greater insight into who Jesus is and might be received and redeemed by God in the coming of God’s Kingdom.”

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May 15, 2023

Tolerating Doubt & Ambiguity

Is your faith a house of cards? If you were wrong about one belief would the whole structure just collapse? If even one injury came to you, one instance of broken trust, would the whole castle fall? If one element was seemingly inconsistent or incompatible—would you burn down the house? This depiction of the psychology of faith is quite fragile. It falls over to even the lightest breath. But what would a flexible faith be? Resilient to even the heaviest gusts of life’s hurricanes. It would adapt and grow as a living, responsive faith. Psychologist Elizabeth Hall joins Evan Rosa to discuss the domains of psychology and theology and what it means for each to “stay in their lane”; she introduces a distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge, and identifies the social- and self-imposed pressure to know everything with certainty; we reflect on the recent trends toward deconversion from faith in light of these pressures; and she offers psychologically grounded guidance for approaching doubt and ambiguity in a secure relational context, seeking to make the unspoken or implicit doubts explicit. Rather than remaining perched upon our individualized, certainty-driven house-of-card faith; she lays out a way to inhabit a flexible, resilient, and relationally grounded faith, tolerant of ambiguity and adaptive and secure amidst all our winds of doubt. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Elizabeth Hall