What's So Great About The Assumption?
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Tuesday, August 17, 2010 10:00 AM
I made an apologetics blunder this weekend.
My daughter and I were in New York on a “girls’ weekend out” trip and staying with a beloved aunt who is not a believer.
Usually when we’re in town we go to Mass in her neighborhood, but for the Assumption, we wanted to do something special and went to St. Patrick’s cathedral.
My aunt had never heard of the Assumption and wanted to know what it was. Like a moron I started explaining the resurrection of the body in terms too technical and boring for anyone to be interested.
I soon realized I was conveying nothing—and certainly not telling her what she wanted to know, which was what we were celebrating.
So I tried again: the Assumption is the day Mary went to heaven, body and soul, and she’s proof we can (eventually) too!
Her eyes unglazed. That she could understand.
That was Saturday night, and I had to laugh Sunday morning when the homilist made my same mistake (although, ahem, at considerably more length). He downloaded everything he could possibly know about the various Marian dogmas and how they were defined onto our hard drives, and never got around to the happy part. Mary’s in heaven, and we can be too.
The Pope, however, made no such mistake in his homily.
He got straight to the point:
the nucleus of our faith in the Assumption: we believe that Mary, as Christ her Son, has already conquered death and triumphs now in heavenly glory in the totality of her being, “in soul and body.”
And while he “unpacked” the implications of this belief a little further, he brought it back to its joyful essence: it’s not just about Mary, it’s about us:
Dear friends! Let us not limit ourselves to admire Mary in her glorious destiny, as a person who is far from us: no! We are called to see what the Lord, in his love, also willed for us, for our final destiny: to live through faith in perfect communion of love with him and thus to truly live.
(The photo is of the Holy Father greeting people as he leaves the parish of St. Thomas where he celebrated Mass on Sunday.)
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