The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The story of humanity begins in a garden; and all through that story, the beauty of God’s creation has given joy to the human heart. We learn something about the love of God from the loveliness of material things, like the bread which earth has given and human hands have made. The most beautiful creatures in the original garden were two human beings, partly body and partly spirit.

Body and spirit now seem to be constantly at war within us, but that constant struggle is only a part of a much larger one. The whole material side of life, which should be joining in the praise of God and making life beautiful, seems to be moving farther and farther away from God. Nowadays the gap between matter and spirit, between material things and the praise of God, seems to be widening more than ever before, and making life more and more ugly.

The abolition of this ugliness is a theological issue, because a human being will not grow to full stature in an environment of ugliness. It is theologically important to fight against the degradation of language, where “choice” means the death of the unborn; to fight against the degradation of art, which sexualizes Leonardo Da Vinci; and to fight against the persecution of religious minorities such as Christians. In all of these cases, we are fighting for the dignity of human flesh and blood, of the human body.

All over this same world, the Church celebrates today the Assumption of Mary, the theological fact that her purely human flesh and blood was taken up into heaven. God “would not allow her to see the corruption of the tomb”, as we will hear in the Preface. It is the body as well as the soul of Mary that was assumed into heavenly glory, so that she symbolizes how all the material and spiritual aspects of life can be made glorious through redemption. The beauty of Mary, with all of her human bodiliness, stands in stark contrast to the slums we make of our cities, the slums we make of our lives.

To believe in the Assumption is to believe in the dignity and holiness of material things; it is to believe in a future for human flesh. The woman who stands in the heavens, the Virgin Mother of God, is also our mother, and her glory is the guarantee of ours, if only we set our hearts on the things that are above. In this world, with all its signs of ugliness and bloodshed, there is a human community, the Church, which proclaims the sign of the Woman: the sign that human flesh and blood will have an ultimate glory; and that every human being can share in the glory of Mary which we celebrate today.

The Founders of the Cistercian Order understood this verywell. The story of Cîteaux begins, not in a garden, but in what our tradition remembers as a “wilderness”. Their first task was the redemption of matter, a clearing of the wilderness so as to make room for a new vision of the world, a beautiful vision of what a human community could be. Soon the Cistercian spirit would embody itself in the beauty of its architecture, and in the mystery of human friendship. The Cistercians lived by the labor of their hands, in accordance with the Rule of St Benedict. They fought against the degradation of the liturgy by turning to the most authentic sources available to them from the tradition. They stood for the qualities that restore something of the
original harmony between flesh and spirit: moderation and self-control, gentleness and simplicity, and the purity of heart which leads, as it led Mary, to the vision of God.

In all these areas, Cistercians are still witnesses in the world of today to the healing and sanctifying of material things, and of the human person in body and soul, destined to share, like Mary, in the glory of heaven.

At this Divine Liturgy, those who receive the consecrated Bread and Wine become what Mary was: a living ark, containing the Blood of the new and eternal covenant, and Our Lord has promised that he will raise them up on the last day. May we who hear this word of God, observe it by revering the human body and all of creation, so that with hearts expanded and purified, we may see with our own eyes what Mary now sees: the glory and beauty of God.