Aug. 15, 2012 Wednesday: Feast of Assumption

Dormition Monastery on Mount Zion, Jerusalem

What emotions does a mother feel when she knows that she’s about to depart this world, leaving her children behind? On one occasion when I went to give the Last Rites to a mother in her early 50’s with two children who were still in college, I saw on the hospice bed, two grown children laying down side by side with their mother, stroking her face. They didn’t want her to go, and she didn’t want to leave them.


I wonder what emotions Blessed Mother felt before she departed from this earth. On one hand, she would at last see Jesus, her husband Joseph, and Heavenly Father. She spent her whole life longing for Heaven, desiring and doing only what God desired. Yet, just as that mother leaving behind two college-age children, Blessed Mother grieved at leaving behind her spiritual children in the valley of tears.

Blessed Mother went to the grave as her divine son did, to be like Him in everything. Having been preserved from original sin, and from all faults, she did not know the decay of the tomb. Her resurrection was immediate.
A tradition recounts that having reached the age of 72 years (in the year 57 or 58), Blessed Mother reunited around her bed the disciples, who having dispersed, were evangelizing the nations; and that then accompanied by a celestial melody, they were shown a vision of angels, who lifted the stainless soul of Blessed Mother to the bosom of God.

     Meanwhile her body was carried by the apostles in the midst of a choir of angels, because she was the queen of both, and was placed in a sepulcher near the Garden of Gethsemane. Three days later, when St. Thomas arrived and wanted to see and honor that temple of God for the last time, the sepulcher was opened, and the body of Blessed Mother was no longer in it.

    They could find only the linens in which she had been wrapped and which gave off a celestial fragrance. Overwhelmed with admiration, and assisted by the Holy Spirit, they interpreted that He who had humbled himself to become incarnate in the womb of Mary, ever Virgin, determined to transport her uncorrupted and immaculate body to glory, animating it anew, without awaiting the general resurrection.

What is now our Heavenly Mother’s hope and longing for us? She reminds us that we are not made happy by the glory of this world, its riches, pleasures, and power. We are made happy instead by poverty, obedience, humility, suffering, obscurity, endless crosses, if we accept and use all of these things with faith and love. She desires that we lock our heart against selfishness. She desires for us to meditate on her sorrows that she experienced while she was on earth, for she will attain graces for us. She reminds us not to be afraid or allow our hearts to be saddened because where she is, we can be--and soon, if we are pure, if we love the cross, and if Jesus is in our life.