“JMJ”
Dear friends,
The idea of a “Holy Day of Obligation” reflects a Christian
Culture in which certain religious festivals were so significant that people
would take the day off, rest, pray, gather with family and friends. Businesses
and shops would close. Everyone would
enjoy a “Sabbath-like” rest during the week.
We still see some of this attitude to celebrate a national day of
Thanksgiving and the Birth of Our Lord.
Sadly, in our secularist society, holy days are replaced by
state holidays. Most of us get the day
off to celebrate Labor Day – it is often not so easy to celebrate the
Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven. This
Thursday is a Holy day of obligation. It
is a grave sin to consciously decide to skip Mass. However, rather than focus on simply “not
sinning,” perhaps Assumption day can be reclaimed as a blessed excuse to
celebrate the “end of summer” with family and friends. Maybe you can’t take the whole day off, but
go out to lunch with friends, take your children or grandchildren to get ice
cream. Have a mid-week cookout.
I am leaving you with some of Sheen’s thoughts on the Assumption
and maybe you can share them with your friends and family. The Solemnity of the Assumption of Our Lady
is a great feast, worthy of a day of rest, prayer and celebration. Let’s take back a sense of the sacred-party
in our busy world.
Sincerely,
Msgr. Stanley Deptula
Executive Director, Archbishop Sheen Foundation
“Now in definition of the Assumption, it has to give hope to
the creature of despair. Modern despair is
the effect of a disappointed hedonism and centers principally around sex and
death. The Assumption affirms not sex but Love. Love, like fire, burns upward, since it is
basically desire. It seeks to become
more and more united with the object that is loved. This ‘pull’ on our hearts by the Spirit of
God is always present, and it is only our refusing wills and the weakness of
our bodies as a result of sin which keep us earth-bound. If God exerts a gravitational pull on all
souls, given the intense love of Our Lord for His Blessed Mother which
descended, and the intense love of Mary for Her Lord which ascended, there is
created a suspicion that love at this stage would be so great as ‘to pull the
body with it.’ Given further an immunity
from original sin, there would not be in the Body of Our Lady the dichotomy,
tension, and opposition that exists in us between body and soul. If the distant moon moves all the surging
tides of earth, then the love of Mary for Jesus and the love of Jesus for Mary
should result in such an ecstasy as ‘to lift her out of this world.’ One thing is certain: the Assumption is easy
to understand if one loves God deeply, but it is hard to understand if one
loves not.
With one stroke of an infallible dogmatic pen, the Church
lifts the sacredness of love out of sex without denying the role of the body in
love. Here is one body that reflects in
its uncounted hues the creative love of God.
To a world that worships the body, the Church now says: ‘There are two
bodies in heaven, one the glorified human nature of Jesus, the other the
assumed human nature of Mary. Love is
the secret of the Ascension of one and the Assumption of the other, for Love
craves unity with its Beloved. The Son
returns to the Father in the unity of Divine Nature; and Mary returns to Jesus
in the unity of human nature. Her
nuptial flight is the event to which our whole generation moves.’
Shall she, as the garden in which grew the lily of divine
sinlessness and the red rose of the passion of redemption, be delivered over to
the weeds and be forgotten by the Heavenly Gardener? Would not one communion preserved in grace
through life ensure a heavenly immortality?
No grown men and women would like to see the home in which they were
reared subjected to the violent destruction of a bomb, even though they no
longer lived in it. Neither would
Omnipotence, Who tabernacle Himself within Mary, consent to see His fleshly
home subjected to the dissolution of the tomb.
Shall not the Divine Life go back in search of His living cradle and
take that ‘flesh-girt paradise’ to Heaven with Him. She who is the mother of the Eucharist,
escapes the decomposition of death.
Mary becomes the first human person to realize the
historical destiny of the faithful as members of Christ’s mystical Body, beyond
time, beyond death, and beyond judgment. By her Assumption she goes ahead like
her Son to prepare a place for us. Mary
always seems to be the Advent of what is in store for man. She anticipates
Christ for nine months, as she bears Heaven within her; she anticipates His
Passion at Cana and His Church at Pentecost. Now in the last great Doctrine of
the Assumption, she anticipates heavenly glory, and the definition comes at a
time when men think of it least.”
Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (The World’s First
Love)
