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From the Associate:
An Interesting Assumption
August 15th: the Feast of the Assumption.
"What an odd name for a feast," my agnostic friend said to me. "What particular assumption is it that you Catholics are celebrating? I assume you know?"
He was only partially satisfied with my explanation that the word "assumption" comes from the Latin, meaning to "take up," and that this referred to the 'taking up' of Mary into heaven. "But I don't get it," he said with a puzzled look. "Sure, I understand that you think Mary went to heaven, but don't you think that about all kinds of people? Why not talk about the Assumption of St. Francis? Didn't he go to heaven too?"
"Yes," I said, "but we hold that Mary was taken up body and soul, whereas Francis and any others who are destined for heaven will have to wait for the resurrection of their bodies at the end of time."
"But so what?" he shot back. "What's the point?" I later got to thinking that his confusion about the Assumption of Mary is not so uncommon. What really is the point of this feast? For Catholics and non-Catholics alike, it often comes down to another somewhat vague way to honor the Blessed Virgin. But in fact this feast is not mainly about the Blessed Virgin; or rather, it is about her, but about her as one of us. It is mainly about humanity as a whole, and what it means to be redeemed by Christ.
Of course, the Church honors Mary in many lovely and appropriate ways. But this is different. The Assumption is a defined dogma of the Church, meaning that it deals with a very important truth that we need to understand and to believe as part of the faith of the Church. What is this truth that is so important that the Church has gone to the extraordinary measure of declaring it part of the "deposit of faith"?
Just this: St. Paul says in one of his letters: "The wages of sin is death." We die, not because we are supposed to die, but because sin is working in us. "Death entered the world through sin." At the deepest level, death is not natural to us, which is why we find it so difficult and grievous. Something tells us that this was not supposed to happen, this getting old and decaying and finally seeing physical life slip away. It is somehow wrong, even if there is no escaping it.
Here is the great importance of the doctrine of the Assumption. It underlines this truth, this connection between sin and death, and more importantly, it points to the way to be cured, to the connection between life and God's grace. Mary is one of us, flesh and blood, made of the same stuff we are. Unlike Jesus, who although he is really a man is also the divine Son of God, Mary is completely a woman, no more divine by nature than me or you. By a special gift of God she was conceived without original sin, born without that wound that leads to death. The saving work of Christ was given to her, so to speak, retroactively. And because she never sinned, she was not subject to death the way we are. Her soul and her body were brought into perfection and into beauty and into divine life without having to undergo the fearful separation that has been the lot of the children of Adam and Eve ever since their fall.
So Mary is now, in her shining strength and beauty, what
we one day hope to be, and will be if Christ has his way with
us. This is why the Church has always called Mary
"spes nostra:" our hope, and why we call her the "new Eve." When we celebrate the Assumption of Mary, we are remembering the incomparable destiny to which we are called, which Mary our mother has already achieved by God's special gift, and for which we wait in joyful hope. Mary, by her Yes to God, a Yes that rings down the ages, has undone the curse of Eve, and the way is opened for us into light and joy.
The Assumption is the great feast of the dignity and the hope of the human race in Christ.
Fr. Michael
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