Happy feast of the Assumption, everyone! This is a great
feast in Madonna House, and in the Church at large, of course. I will have more
to say tomorrow about how we celebrate this day here.
For now, I provide for your reading pleasure a somewhat
longer than usual excerpt from my book The Air We
Breathe, precisely on the mystery of the Assumption and the joy it
brings to the world. So here, below the break, it is:
The quality of Marian joy is shot through all of Catherine’s
writings. Mary is the one who communicates to us that the path of Christ, the
way of the Cross, the path of surrender, obedience, dispossession, detachment,
death to self–all of those words that seem so daunting and unattractive to
us–in truth leads to eternal joy and glory. And this eternal joy which will
only be ours in heaven already begins to stir within us in our earthly lives.
Our following of Christ, whatever suffering or burden it may entail upon us,
always has a note of joy in it, faint and frail as it may be at times, and this
note grows stronger in our lives as his grace in us increases. Mary’s presence
helps us in this. She herself brings us joy and she holds before us always the
overwhelmingly joyful quality of the Christian religion.
Catherine
connects Mary and joy most especially in the feast of the Assumption. Mary’s
own complete entry, body and soul, into the perfect joy of heaven makes her an
icon of joy and victory for all Christians. Mary the human creature is unique
among creatures in perfectly walking the path of God in the world, and so she
alone shows us that this path is, for us, the true path of life and beauty.
Catherine reflects on this often. For example:
At the moment of my death I shall see and faith will become a
reality! That is why it will disappear! For there will be no need to speculate
in any way. The folded wings will unfold and I shall shout, "Allelu!
Allelu! Allelu! I know what death is… On death I shall burst open, as it were,
as a ripe fruit… and the reality of the Triune God, especially Christ, will be
mine. And I will know that death is life, because Christ conquered it. And
somewhere on the side, the Mother of man who is also the Mother of God, and who
long ago woke up from her sleep, will put out her hand and say, "You see
where dispossession brought you? It brought you to the possession of the
Trinity, of Love."[i]
Catherine loved to meditate on the
event of Mary’s assumption, which no human eyes witnessed. She calls August a
“month of mystery… of light and joy, yet hidden, at an immense depth, and
un-revealed to the mortal eyes of man… in which Heaven saw its gentle
immaculate Queen crowned.”[ii] She wonders if Mary was taken up on a night
“full of strange light... studded with the stars of the universe, reflecting
the translucent light of a full moon? Or was it dawn in all its glory that saw
Her assumed into Heaven? No one saw… No one was there but Faith…which sees
without seeing.”[iii]
Her poetic imagination is at work
here for a purpose. Catherine did not simply paint word pictures for their own
sake, or as an exercise in idle speculation. In meditating on the physical fact
of Mary’s bodily Assumption to heaven, the event by which “Earth’s most
beautiful, immaculate, perfect daughter knew not the darkness of the grave, nor
the touch of dissolution or decay,”[iv]
Catherine is drawing her readers’ minds and hearts to an urgent truth. Mary’s
assumption reveals to us the true trajectory of human life, the purpose for
which God created the human race. Why are we here? Where is our life is going,
if we choose to cooperate with our Maker? Mary assumed to heaven is the answer
to this.
In the modern world, where
secularism has driven the hope of heaven from the hearts of so many, and even
from the conscious concern of many believers, this meditation on Mary is a
welcome corrective:
Do we meditate enough on this
glorious, joyous mystery? How we need to do just that, we whose generation and
times hold so many orphaned souls… who are children of twilights and wars, who
live in the shadowy land of a thousand fears… who stand in such desperate need
of wisdom to guide us on a straight course…”[v]
Mary assumed into heaven sets us
precisely on this straight course by showing us that our destiny is love and
joy. And, as Mary’s Assumption is a feast “of love, of reunion, of joy, of
gladness,” Catherine also sees it as spurring us on to evangelical zeal:
Who beholding the ‘death’ of Mary
does not think of her life? And who, thinking of this, does not want to arise
and go preaching the Gospel of her Son, the gospel of love for Him? That love
must spill itself into each life, change it, and go on spilling, even
overflowing on one’s neighbor, on the world.[vi]
This love,
for Catherine, is synonymous with another Marian concept, namely “the ability
to be pregnant with God.”[vii]
Love is from God and, as Catherine loved to quote, “God is Love.” (1
John 4:16). To love is to have God living in us, and this is what she means by
being pregnant with God. “It wasn’t Mary alone who was pregnant with him… At
Baptism our soul, or our heart as we say, is opened to becoming pregnant with
God.”[viii]
This image is important to
Catherine not simply because of its vividness and Marian reference. It is a
vital image in her writings because “we’re small, we’re little, we don’t
understand much but… pregnancy means growth.”[ix]
In other words, love starts small in us. We begin to live the Gospel very
imperfectly and with many mistakes. There is much we do not understand, and
much that we initially cannot embrace concerning the heights and depths of
following Christ. But as Christ grows in us, our hearts become bigger. “We have
to have an open heart, a wide heart, an immense heart, to give him room to
grow, for God needs room.”[x]
Here again
the theme of joy is not distant. It is in this very context of love growing,
our hearts growing and becoming bigger to welcome Christ and his love into our
being, that Catherine bursts out in ecstasy:
I was thinking of that and suddenly
it seemed to me that the house was filled with music, and my heart was like a
floor and all the people he brought in: the lame, the halt and the blind and
the crippled and the well and the young and the old, all were dancing for the
tune was such that you couldn’t stop! And I suddenly thought to myself, to
become pregnant with Christ is to be free and to be joyous. It’s to be open
because when you become a dancing floor, surely it’s as open as a floor is.[xi]
Love means breaking through to
openness and acceptance of everyone. It finally puts an end to our whole dreary
project of attempting to control life, ourselves and other people: “People get
all muddled. They think that they have to… manipulate. I want to manipulate
myself. I want to be able to close the door and open it when I want to… The
pregnancy of Christ—I don’t want to be pregnant.”[xii]
The answer for Catherine always comes with radiant simplicity: “Look, this is your head, my head… Be simple. Stop these complications. You don’t have to be complex. Complexity is going to get you nowhere. Be a dancing floor… Oh, so many beautiful things happen when you believe in God.”[xiii]
[i] Transcript, Mass
Preparation, August 14, 1972.
[ii] “Where Love is, God is,”
in Restoration, August, 1954.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] “The B’s Corner,” in Restoration,
August, 1951.
[vii] “Pregnant With God,” in Restoration,
December, 1978.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid. Emphasis in
original.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid.