This has been bugging me since my ENGL 112 class ended.
We talked about RATIONALITY and IRRATIONALITY in Macbeth and in our lives as a way to start thinking about why the play still matters.
As my students completed their daily writing, I listed a bunch of topics where you could experience the pull between the rational and irrational in your life. They included:
- Love
- Family
- Career
- Friends
- Money
- Health
Here’s what’s been bugging me. The most obvious category of my life where I experience the tugs of Rationality and Irrationality is my FAITH, and I left that category out!
In fact, the term FAITH in the New Testament refers to our willingness to believe things that we can’t necessarily see (Hebrews 11:1).
We just got through celebrating Easter, and that holy day always reminds me that my belief in God is premised on my belief that a God-man rose from the dead. This is sometimes a difficult thing to believe two thousand years ago, and sometimes it’s a difficult thing to believe now. This isn’t the way “death” works. It’s why we’re so crushed when our loved ones die. They can’t come back to life. And yet we believe that Christ did just that: he died, was buried for three days, and then rose again.
Does this mean our faith is irrational?
Certainly not. God’s ability to upend the “laws of nature” should make us see that the things we take for granted in nature are themselves miracles. We might think it’s rational to believe the sun will be up in the sky every morning. It’s always been there. But consider this quotation from GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:
For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
I love Chesterton’s image of a God who has not set the world spinning and simply leaves it on its own. In fact the most commonplace elements of nature are not repetitious because God set them whirring and let them be, but because God gets pleasure out of seeing the beauty of the universe again and again and again.
That is, there’s an element of the miraculous, of something that exceeds reason, in beauty of a flower. There’s something beautiful—and logical/rational—about a God who would sacrifice himself for his creatures.
While Macbeth experiences the pull of rationality and irrationality as temptations, we don’t have to. Being aware of the rational and irrational in our lives can keep us alive to the world, secure both in the fact that God has made the world (that it won’t fall apart overnight) and aware of his ability to overcome something as fundamental to the human condition as death.