We honor Mary in so many different ways in our Catholic faith. The way we honor Mary is reflected in different cultures and eras in history. In her book on the devotions that the Christian faithful have to our Blessed Mother, author Marina Warner has this to say regarding an ancient tradition that honored Mary on the feast of her Assumption: “As early as the tenth century, the intimate association between the aromas of herbs and flowers and the victory of Mary over death was celebrated in the ritual of the feast of the Assumption. Medicinal herbs and plants were brought to church on that day. Periwinkle, verbena, thyme, and many other ingredients of the herbalist's art were laid on the altar, to be incensed and blessed. Then they were bound into a sheaf and kept all year to ward off illness and disaster and death. But the ceremony was abolished in England at the Reformation, and is extinct everywhere now except in some towns of northern Italy."
As I write this homily in Mary for the feast of the Assumption in the middle of August, I think about how earlier in the month, our Church’s liturgical calendar honors of the Dedication of the Basilica of St Mary Major on August 5; this is the major basilica dedicated to Mary’s honor in the holy city of Rome. Then, a month from today, we honor Mary as the Sorrowful Mother, as the Mother of Jesus who kept vigil with her son as he carried his cross, who never left her son and who kept faith and confidence in him and his mission, pondering all those sorrows and sufferings in her heart. Just last month on July 16, we celebrated Our Lady of Mount Carmel with our Carmelites nuns here in Jackson. When I was on the plane flying back from the mission appeal in California at the end of July, I sat next to a man who had overheard me telling another passenger in the airport terminal that I was a Catholic. During the flight, he told me about how his two pilgrimages to apparitions of Mary in Medjugorje had so affected his life of faith. He also told me about a book he read on Our Lady of Kibeho, an apparition of Mary from Rwanda in Africa, urging me to read that book.
The Catholic faithful have such a deep and loving devotion to Mary because she is not only Jesus’ mother, but the mother of our Church and the mother of our Lord. Mary, the young woman who sang a song of hope and joy in the Magnificat in response to the gracious greeting that she receives from her cousin Elizabeth, is our mother who listens to our prayers, who unites our prayers to hers, who presents those prayers to her son with a mother’s love and compassion. Like the ritual described by author Marina Warner from England in the 10th century, we honor Mary in so many different ways with flowers and lit candles.
When we look back at when the Assumption was declared as a dogma of our faith in 1950 by Pope Pius XII, it came in the midst of a very tumultuous 20th century. The world had experienced the Russian revolution, the Spanish Civil War, two world wars, the Holocaust, and the start of the Korean War. By declaring the Assumption of Mary into heaven body and soul, Pope Pius XII was responding to the requests of the faithful, but at the same time, he reaffirmed the dignity of the human body and the sacredness of our human journey.
The real meaning of the Assumption of Mary is not just found in what literally occurred in that event, but also in the divine mystery that the Assumption of Mary represents in our faith. In our world of cell phones, technology, and computers, of fast comfortable travel throughout the world, of space exploration and man landing on the moon being almost two decades away when the Assumption was declared in 1950, we can sometimes take for granted the way we currently see the world and the universe and our place within that reality. It is noteworthy that preeminent Swiss psychologist Carl Jung considered the Assumption to be the most important religious declaration of the twentieth century. There is a theology and a tradition in the solemnity we celebrate today, to be sure, but at the heart of our celebration today is the love and honor we bestow upon our Blessed Mother and for the way she accompanies us with so much love and tenderness on our journey of faith.
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