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.”

Divine Physicality

Fourth Sunday of Advent Year C

Gnosticism is one of the most ancient philosophies or ideologies known to man. It had its origin in paganism but burst into full flower when several groups who appropriated its teachings eventually broke from early Christianity. Many are not aware that Gnosticism is still quite active and alive. Today, this ideology is found in several religions of the East, in the New Age movement and also in secular modern thought. At the heart of Gnosticism is a hatred of the material world, in particular, the human body. One can already see traces of this in the transgender movement. The pagan Gnostics rejected the material world as the evil creation of an inferior Demiurge, the world-making deity, that later Gnostic heretics identified with Creator God, as revealed in the Old Testament. Against the orthodox understanding of the goodness of all creation, they believed that the material world was irredeemable, and therefore that human redemption meant salvation of the immaterial soul — the divine spark—from its imprisonment. The doctrine of total depravity in Calvinism which has influenced much of Protestantism is quite loosely similar to this notion, thus the Protestant distrust and even rejection of any physical or visible representation of the divine.

All this is of course at odds with our Catholic sensibilities. Catholicism is physical as it is spiritual. Physicality is at the heart of the principle of sacramentality – “outward sign of inward grace” – the invisible concealed and revealed in the visible. Our faith is not about ideas or dead texts found in a book, but about the Word becoming flesh. This is what the Incarnation means – “in the flesh.” It is centered on one born of a woman, born under the Jewish law, to save us not through the promise of future incarnations of our 'spirits', but through the offering of His body once and for all. The ministry of Jesus is to poor human bodies. He opens eyes so that they see, ears so that they hear, and He loosens tongues so that they speak.

Likewise, the scene of the Visitation is pregnant with the physical (forgive the pun). The visitation of Elizabeth by Mary is about bodies: pregnant bodies, a kicking foetus, sounds reaching ears, and mouths speaking. Elizabeth hears and believes and proclaims. Our attention is drawn to her hearing and her speaking. Even the movement of the child within her womb is a revelation. Revelation is communicated to Elizabeth and faith is established in her through physical events: her meeting with Mary, their conversation, John the Baptist leaping in her womb, with the Spirit working through these things. Not just spirit, but spirit and flesh.

Likewise in the second reading from Hebrews we are told that Jesus, on coming into the world, is given a body. By presenting Christ’s taking flesh in this way, Hebrews tell us a number of things about the mystery of the Incarnation. They tell us first about the importance of the body, of Christ’s body. Christmas is a very physical affair. It is about God, who is wholly spiritual and immaterial, sharing in the material bodily lives of our humanity, so that we may have a share in His divinity. It recognises the fact that we are bodily creatures, part of a material creation, and that our bodies and the physical world around us are of real value in the eyes of the God who created them. Our bodies are essential to our common life together, to the way we communicate one with another, and share our lives with each other. All this was affirmed when God communicated with us, spoke with us, by becoming one of us, by taking a human body to Himself from the body of a human mother, when the Word became flesh.

But Hebrews does not tell us only of a body. It tells us about Christ’s activity. Christ has come to do God’s will. The human body, human life, is brought to perfection by the action of Christ. The Son of God, did not just come to heal our bodies but He came to suffer and die, and He rose again, in order to become the source of our salvation. He came not only to save the immortal spiritual soul, but our physical bodies. Here we see how the communion between us and God is restored: Christ takes a body that can die. It is not enough for Him simply to be human, and it is not enough for us simply to be human. He does God’s will, and so brings us the forgiveness of our sins. No longer need we take animals to represent our sacrifice, no longer do we need to make any burnt offerings for sin: it is done in the body of Jesus Christ offered once, and for all, and continues in the offering of ourselves, our bodies, in union with Him in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. We participate by grace in Christ’s offering of Himself, by receiving His body and blood at the altar, and by becoming more deeply as members of His one body, offered in one Spirit to the Father.

Ours then is a physical religion. At its heart is the woman who said 'let what you have said be done to me', and the man who says 'behold I have come to do your will in the body you have prepared for me'. The physicality of the Visitation, and in fact of the other great events in the history of salvation recorded here in the Gospel of St Luke; the Annunciation, the Nativity of our Lord, His Passion, Death and Resurrection, all point to the physicality which we experience whenever we enter our churches. It points us to the tabernacle where not just the soul or divine spirit of Our Lord resides, but where both His soul and divinity, body and blood are physically, really, substantially and continuously present. If you love our Lady, you must love the Eucharist. You see, the primordial tabernacle, the first vessel for Jesus Christ, is the Blessed Virgin Mary.

How do we react when we find ourselves so near to our Lord, to His “physical” presence? John, the child in Elizabeth’s womb, could not contain his joy and leapt, danced, rejoiced at the approach of Jesus. I think it is fair to say that few of us react with such poignant and uncontainable joy when we come close to our Lord. In every Catholic church, there present is Jesus Christ – in His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. Fully, truly, really, and substantially present. This is not a mere symbol, nor even some manner of imperfect presence. Far too often we are guilty of falling scandalously short of appropriate reverence for the Eucharist. Let us pray that we will experience the same excitement as did a child in his mother’s womb.

Apart from St John, we have Mary, our Blessed Mother, the perfect example of devotion to Jesus, of reverence for His Holy Presence. She leads the Church to keep vigil at the crèche, awaiting the birth of her son. Consider the words of Saint Teresa of Calcutta: “In the mystery of the Annunciation and the Visitation, Mary is the very model of the life we should lead. First of all, she welcomed Jesus in her existence; then, she shared what she had received. Every time we receive Holy Communion, Jesus the Word becomes flesh in our life – gift of God who is at one and the same time beautiful, kind, unique. Thus, the first Eucharist was such: Mary’s offering of her Son in her, in whom he had set up the first altar. Mary, the only one who could affirm with absolute confidence, “this is my body”, from that first moment offered her own body, her strength, all her being, to form the Body of Christ.”

I would like to make a final comment on the Feast of the Visitation, which is now celebrated on the 31^st of May every year. In the year 1389, Pope Urban VI extended the celebration of the feast of the Visitation to the entire Church.  It was a tumultuous time for the Church, who was experiencing the effects of the Great Schism – the Church was divided into East and West. Urban VI hoped that Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary would visit the Church and put an end to the turmoil. In our busyness to make preparation for Christmas, let us never forget to ask our Mother to pray for the Church and put an end to the turmoil we are experiencing now.

Our Bodies are destined for Heaven

Solemnity of the Assumption of Our Lady

In one of only two dogmas ever declared infallible by the pope, Venerable Pope Pius XII definitively taught a reality of faith that slowly became better understood after centuries of theological reflexion and liturgical celebration: “the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” Though this dogma is the most recent, only defined and promulgated in the year 1950 (thus considered to be a modern dogma by Church standards), it is the oldest feast day of Our Lady, but we don't know how it first came to be celebrated. Its origin is lost in those days when Jerusalem was restored as a sacred city, at the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine (c. 285-337). For two centuries, every memory of Jesus was obliterated from the city, and the sites made holy by His life, death and Resurrection became pagan temples.

After building the holiest monument in Christendom, Church of the Holy Sepulchre (marking the place of both our Lord’s execution as well as His entombment) in 336, other sacred sites began to be restored and memories of the life of Our Lord began to be celebrated by the people of Jerusalem. One of the memories about His mother centered around the “Tomb of Mary,” close to Mount Zion, where the early Christian community had lived. On the hill itself was the “Place of Dormition,” the spot of Mary's “falling asleep,” where she had died. The tomb of Mary was where she was buried but the tomb, like the Holy Sepulchre, is empty. Testimony of her Assumption. Today, we have two churches reputed to mark the spot, the Catholic Abbey Church of Dormition on Mount Zion and the Orthodox Shrine of the Tomb of the Theotokos at the foothill of Mount Olivet. Take your pick. But I’m partial to the Catholic shrine, not because it’s Catholic, but because of the testimony of tradition (Mount Zion).

All the feast days of the Blessed Virgin Mary mark the great mysteries of her life and her part in the work of redemption. But the feast we celebrate today is the crowning feast. A trophy, not one won by our Lady but by God Himself. The Assumption completes God's work in her since it was not fitting that the flesh that had given life to God Himself should ever undergo corruption. The Assumption is God's crowning of His work as the Blessed Virgin ends her earthly life and enters eternity. The feast turns our eyes in that direction, where we hope to follow when our earthly life is over. The feast of the Assumption reminds us that our common human experiences are oriented in the same direction Mary took, eternal life in Heaven. This life, with all its ups and downs, is not the end of all. Today’s feast showcases the ultimate promise of our Lord that earthly experiences are not the end.

This feast teaches us that our bodies are ultimately destined for heaven — not just our souls. Our bodies will rise again to be reunited with our souls eternally. Hence this is the reason why the Church has always had great reverence for the human body, shown in a particular way by how she has cared for the bodies of deceased Christians by reverently burying them in anticipation of the resurrection on the last day. In the midst of a pagan culture that didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body — a culture that thought the Catholic claim that Jesus rose from the dead was absolutely absurd — and cremated their loved ones, the Christians buried their dead full-body style in anticipation of the resurrection of the body. They would mark their gravesites with Christian inscriptions like RIP, requiescat in pace, “the body is resting here in peace,” resting until the resurrection, or depositus in pace, “this body is placed here in peace.” So the first Christians used this expression and the word “deposit” to communicate that this body was being placed in the ground only for a certain length of time — until when? — until Our Lord Himself came with the withdrawal slip for the universal resurrection.

Unfortunately, today we live in a neo-pagan culture that, as with their pagan ancestors, is beginning to cremate their loved ones more and more. This is a culture that no longer, practically-speaking, believes in the resurrection of the body, and very often, even takes our Lord’s resurrection for granted. As St. Paul says, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.” In other words, if Christ didn’t rise from the dead, and if there is no resurrection from the dead, then let’s just throw the bodies into the nearest drain!

The devout Jewish women, who believed in the resurrection of the body, anointed Jesus’ in preparation for resurrection. If Jesus had been handled by pagan women, or if the Roman pagan soldiers had gotten hold of Him, He would most likely have been cremated. Imagine that! When the Lord would have been resurrected, everybody would have thought he were simply a ghost, and there would have been no way to prove otherwise, because there would have been no empty tomb and the urn in which he might have been placed after cremation, might just have been emptied in some other way. Likewise, if Our Lady had not been placed full-bodied in her tomb, but rather cremated, then the Tomb of Mary is a hoax, we might as well go home now. There’s nothing to celebrate. The bodily Assumption of Our Lady did not take place! The Church lied to you! 

In extreme circumstances, the Church permits cremation, as long as it is not an explicit denial of the resurrection of the body, but only “in extreme circumstances.” Cremation is always an exception. It is never the norm. Since the Church began to permit this “in extreme circumstances,” cremation seems to have become normative. This is simply because the person thought that the Church was absolutely fine with this now, or just preferred to be cremated, or simply to save some money — money that, strictly-speaking, most of the time, is not the money needed to put food on the table for example, but money they’d just rather hold onto, because, basically, they don’t see full-body burial for the real Christian value it is. My brothers and sisters in Christ, particularly those among our seniors who might think about these issues more than the younger ones would: if you’re thinking about being cremated for anything other than extreme circumstances, please reconsider. If you have the means, go and buy a plot. Show by your choice here that you choose the truth, that your body will be raised from the dead by the Lord, that you choose to die in the Lord and be buried in the Lord following His lead of being buried full-body style — and show to a world that accepts these truths less and less today, that you are a Christian in life and in death. If you have the means!

At every Mass, we receive the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Here, we literally receive Our Lord’s risen body! Not a symbol of His body, but His real body and blood, risen from the dead. This is a real foretaste of heaven. Those who eat this body and drink this blood live in Him and He in them. This is the same flesh He took from the Blessed Mother, whose body now also reigns in heaven. Taking the Lord’s sacred body and blood within us, we may become more and more like Him. And if we wish to know how that looks like, Saint John Paul II tells us that “by looking at [Mary], the Christian learns to discover the value of his own body” (address, July 9, 1997). Mary, glorified in body and soul, show us who we are and what we are to become!