Dr Elizabeth Julian rsm

On 15 August each year we celebrate the patronal feast of Aotearoa New Zealand – Mary’s assumption into heaven.

The actual dogma says:

We pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma that 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.

Pope Francis reminds us:

… Carried up into heaven, she is the Mother and Queen of all creation. In her glorified body, together with the Risen Christ, part of creation has reached the fullness of its beauty (LS #241).

Here we see an aspect of the feast that is becoming increasingly important: the goodness of all creation and Mary’s crucial role in a Christian eco-spirituality, that is, one that has Jesus at the centre.

As Pope Francis says, Mary ‘treasures the entire life of Jesus in her heart’, see Lk 2:19, 51, (LS #241).

But where is heaven? Where has Mary been ‘carried up into’? Actually, heaven has a lot to do with earth. Everything is connected! Jesus’ followers didn’t ask what heaven was like but, instead, what they had to do here in the present to get there in the future. Jesus taught his disciples to pray ‘…thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’.

Furthermore, Pope Francis points out:

Mary, the Mother who cared for Jesus, now cares with maternal affection and pain for this wounded world. Just as her pierced heart mourned the death of Jesus, so now she grieves for the sufferings of the crucified poor and for the creatures of this world laid waste by human power (LS #241).

If heaven means an end to the sufferings the Pope identifies, resulting in perfect happiness and fullness of life for all, that is, no more poverty, no more injustice, no more hunger, no more environmental destruction and so on, then perhaps we must do something about it here and now as our Archdiocesan Synod theme, ‘Go you are sent!’ dictates. Jesus says feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned etc, as New Zealand poet R A K Mason urges in On the Swag. There is a continuity between ‘now’ (earth) and ‘then’ (heaven). Everything is connected! Our responsibility is to help others experience heaven on earth. We cannot shirk this responsibility by assuring the hungry, the homeless, etc, that their reward awaits them in heaven. Our bodies are important now. They are worthy of the utmost dignity, they deserve to be fed and housed. In other words, they matter here.

The feast of Mary’s Assumption affirms the very goodness of our bodies – the whole person will be saved. Mary has been totally redeemed and now shares fully in the risen life of her son Jesus. She is not a ghost or a spirit floating around in the sky. She is a real bodily person. What happened to her will ultimately happen to us. As we pray in the Creed: ‘We believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.’

Mary ‘…now understands the meaning of all things. Hence, we can ask her to enable us to look at this world with eyes of wisdom’ (LS #241), and to have the courage to honour our responsibility to respect and take care of, not only ourselves and one another, but Earth, ‘our common home’.

Mary assumed into heaven, we grieve with you for the ‘sufferings of the crucified poor and for the creatures of this world laid waste by human power’ (LS #241).

For all things Mary go online to udayton.edu/imri/mary/index.php

Dr Elizabeth Julian rsm is a lecturer and Distance Education Coordinator at the Catholic Institute of Aotearoa New Zealand.