Love unites with the Beloved

Homily for the Assumption of Our Lady

Recently I had the opportunity and privilege to read the soon to be canonised (fingers crossed and praying hard) Venerable Fulton Sheen’s beautiful book on the Blessed Virgin Mary, The Woman the World Loved. I would strongly recommend that you get your own personal copy as it ought to be an indispensable addition to your Catholic library collection. In fact, for Archbishop Sheen, it is said that this was his favourite book -“he cherished it more than the rest”, as noted in the foreword.

In the chapter which he dedicated to the theme of the Assumption, he postulated that the Church appropriately timed its promulgation of the two modern dogmas of our Lady, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, to address two diagonally opposing cultural moods prevalent in those respective eras; the optimism, at the dawn of the modern age in the latter half of the nineteenth century (where man believed that he could accomplish anything and everything), and the subsequent pessimistic mood, that followed the two devastating World Wars.

If he is correct, and I believe he is, then the dogma of the Assumption is the Church’s response and challenge to a world that sees no hope beyond the grave. If this life is all there is to it, it is no wonder that this has fuelled a hedonistic mentality that attempts to satiate every sensual and sexual need and want, whilst we are still alive and kicking. In fact, we see how the sexual revolution which began in the 1960s and 1970s had evolved into a culture obsessed with sexual libertinism, redefinitions of sexual and gender roles, normalisations of sexual encounters between consenting partners, rapid rise in divorces and disintegration of families, multiplication of categories that continue to be added on to the ever lengthening abbreviation LGBTQ and advancements in the pornography driven internet. Even the Church and her hierarchy sworn to celibacy have not been spared by this prurient malaise.

According to Archbishop Sheen, the Church through the dogma of the Assumption, had “to give hope to the creature of despair. Modern despair is the effect of a disappointed hedonism and centres principally on sex and death.” Therefore, the Church meets this two-fold problem head-on, “by lifting humanity from the darkness of sex and death, to the light of Love and Life.”

First, the Assumption addresses the world’s obsession with sex by proposing love as the answer. The sexual revolution’s rallying cry, “make love not war” was a lie. There was no love in the orgiastic no-holds-barred sexualised culture of that era. It was not “love” but selfish self-gratifying “free sex” that was being promoted. On the other hand, “the Assumption affirms not sex but love,” writes Sheen. “Love, like fire, burns upward, since it is basically desire. It seeks to become more and more united with the object that is loved.” Love gravitates to the other whereas lust often gravitates to self.

Sheen then makes this wonderful and insightful analogy: “If the distant moon moves all the surging tides of earth, then the love of Mary for Jesus and the love of Jesus for Mary should result in such an ecstasy as “to lift her out of this world”. Love in its nature is an ascension in Christ and an assumption in Mary.” Love, therefore, according to Sheen is the secret of the Assumption, for “love craves unity with the Beloved.” And there is no human soul who can claim to love our Lord more than His own mother. And there is no human soul which our Lord loves more than His own mother, the one who perfectly “does the will of the Father.”

Secondly, Sheen proposes that life is the second philosophical pillar on which the Assumption rests. “Life is unitive; death is divisive. Goodness is the food of life, as evil is the food of death.” If original sin separated man from God, “death is the last stroke of that division.” Since death is the division and separation of a soul from its body and springs from sin, it follows then that the only creature who is preserved from Original Sin is immune from that division which sin begets.

But under this second point, Sheen also makes this startling comparison between the Tabernacle and Mary, rightly called the First Tabernacle, because she enclosed in her womb the true Bread from Heaven. Mary is, therefore, assumed body and soul into heaven because she is united in flesh with her son, our Lord, the Living Bread from heaven. “In this doctrine of the Assumption, the Church meets the despair of the world in a second way. She affirms the beauty of life as against death. When wars, sex, and sin multiply the discords of men, and death threatens on every side, the Church bids us lift up our hearts to the life that has the immortality of the Life that nourished it. Feuerbach said that a man is what he eats. He was more right than he knew. Eat the food of earth, and one dies; eat the Eucharist, and one lives eternally. She, who is the mother of the Eucharist, escapes the decomposition of death.”

More than ever, the message conveyed by the dogma of the Assumption of Mary needs to be heard by a world, trapped and enamoured, even obsessed by sex and death. Today, we live in a sexualised world where persons are single-dimensionally defined by their sexual orientation. It is as if nothing else matters in shaping one’s identity. Sex itself has changed from an intensely private – even secretive – aspect of life, to an object of public display and celebration. Driven by consumer demands, sex has also become a commodity – big businesses push it, use it to sell products, knowing that the demand for it is insatiable. Chastity and purity in an intensively sexualised world have become anomalies. Promiscuity, on the other hand, has become the norm. This obsession with sex and sexual rights have led to the separation of the sexual act from procreation, from life itself. The sexual act of reproduction is intended to ensure that life continues. But when sex is taken out of this larger context of life, then it can only lead to death. No wonder, St John Paul II terms contraception and abortion the “culture of death.”

If we are to address the crisis posed by sex and death, then the dogma of the Assumption must be proclaimed once again, reiterating that sex divorced from love can never lead to life. Only self-giving and life-giving love can guarantee life, and not just any life as necessary for survival but eternal life. Only through the self-gift of love can we recover that integral body-soul identity of ours, not just as sexual beings but creatures made in the “image and likeness of God.” Because God created us in His image with a body, we can express and receive love through that body. It gives us the means by which to show our love and by which others receive our love. And because the body and the spirit both go together, God’s plan is for the salvation not just for the soul but also our flesh, through the flesh of the crucified and risen Lord.

The Venerable Fulton Sheen gives us one last parting advice, “The greatest task of the spiritual leaders today is to save mankind from despair, into which sex and fear of death have cast it. The world that used to say, “Why worry about the next world, when we live in this one?” has finally learned the hard way that, by not thinking about the next life, one cannot even enjoy this life. When optimism completely breaks down and becomes pessimism, the Church holds forth the promise of hope. Threatened as we are by war on all sides, with death about to be rained from the sky by Promethean fires, the Church defines a truth that has Life at its centre. Like a kindly mother whose sons are going off to war, (the Church) strokes our heads and says: “You will come back alive, as Mary came back again after walking down the valley of Death.”