Today we celebrate the bodily assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven. In the Creed, we profess that Jesus Christ is “consubstantial with the Father.” Because he was incarnate by the Spirit’s power through the Virgin Mary, Christ is also consubstantial with us. This is our hope.
Among the many allusions found in our first reading from the Book of Revelation, we find one to Christ’s own Ascension into heaven. When referring to the “woman clothed with the sun,” the inspired author writes that “Her child was caught up to God and his throne.”1 Keep in mind what the two men dressed in white told Jesus’s disciples as they stood looking up as he rose into the sky: “This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.”2
Jesus will not return only to depart again. In the next-to-last chapter of Revelation, we learn that the City of God, “a new Jerusalem,” will come “down out of heaven from God.”3 As this vision is described in the inspired text, a voice from the throne of God says, “Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them [as their God].”4
Jesus Christ is Emmanuel, God with us.5 God dwells with us both now and evermore because of the fiat, the emphatic “Yes!” of Mary of Nazareth. Her “Yes!” to God is beautifully articulated in her Magnificat.
Jesus being truly human and truly divine is one of the paradoxes that constitute the fundamentals of Christian orthodoxy. Mary, virgin and mother, is another fundamental paradox. The former very much depends on the latter. Today’s solemnity readily brings to mind the mysteries of the Blessed Virgin’s Holy Rosary.
The Magnificat, which is the heart of our Gospel today, recalls the Rosary’s very first mystery, the first Joyful Mystery- the Annunciation. The fruit of this mystery is humility. The Virgin Mary’s humility is well-expressed in the opening words of this powerful canticle:
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;Mary’s Assumption is related to her Son’s Ascension. Jesus’s Ascension is the second Glorious Mystery of the Rosary. The fruit of contemplating this mystery is hope. As the Mother of God herself experienced through her Son’s passion and death, hope lies beyond optimism.
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant6
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, ca. 1680
Vaclav Havel observed, “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.” I think the witness of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, whose feast the Church celebrated yesterday, gives us a concrete example of what Havel meant by his assertion that hope is anchored beyond the horizon of immediate experience. How else could Saint Maximilian forfeit his own life to save a fellow prisoner?
The Blessed Virgin’s Assumption is the fourth of the Rosary’s Glorious Mysteries. The fruit of this mystery is the grace of a happy death. I recently experienced the death of a close friend. His death reminded me that nothing seems more hopeless than death. A few days after Kyle’s funeral, I read this by theologian Father David Tracy:
our beloved dead, whose fates no one really knows, are painfully invisible to us now. Indeed, the dead possess a unique form of invisibility: the dead are presently absent and absently present. When Dante first experiences the underworld and sees so many dead persons he once knew well in life, he exclaims, 'I did not know that death had undone so many’7Father Tracy ends his meditation with “We all know the feeling.”8 “Hopelessness,” Havel insisted, introducing yet another paradox, “is the very soil that nourishes human hope.”
If you consider all four sets of the mysteries that constitute the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary in order, the final mystery, the fifth Glorious Mystery, is Mary’s Coronation as Queen of Heaven. Her status as Queen of Heaven is also referenced in our Revelation reading: “on her head a crown of twelve stars.”9 One of the many titles of Mary, the Mother of God, is Star of Sea. She is a beacon of hope as we sail the tumultuous sea of life.
The fruit of the mystery of the Blessed Virgin’s heavenly Coronation is trust in her intercession. I want to conclude by reciting the Memorare. If you know it, I invite you to join me:
Remember, O most blessed Virgin Mary,Veni Sancte Spiritus, veni per Mariam. Amen.
that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection,
implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided.
Inspired by this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my mother;
to thee I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful.
O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions,
but in thy mercy hear and answer me
1 Revelation 12:1; 12:5.↩
2 Acts 1:11.↩
3 Revelation 21:2.↩
4 Revelation 21:3.↩
5 Matthew 1:23.↩
6 Luke 1:46-48.↩
7 David Tracy, Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time, Collected Essays, Vol 1., 36.↩
8 Ibid.↩
9 Revelation 12:1.↩
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