Friday, August 15, 2025
Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
All of us
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me
and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.
Hail Mary, full of grace. Blessed art thou among women.
And it isn’t only Mary who is blessed. He has mercy on those who fear him in all generations. Henri Nouwen again simplifies the theology for us and reminds us of the power of God’s love:
If you dare to believe that you are beloved before you were born, you may suddenly realize that your life is very, very special.
Do I dare? When fear’s tentacles wrap themselves around my heart I might hesitate, but I’d better not … not dare to believe. I am beloved. As Mary’s magnificent testimony says, “The Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.”
Of course we aren’t here on vacation, and at least for me that scenario tempts me bigtime. In the enneagram world, 7’s (and I’m a 7) are always looking at the silver lining. Suffering doesn’t really count much, because there’s always a sunny side of the street. Just walk across. But there is more, and Nouwen describes it well.
You become conscious that you were sent here just for a short time, for twenty, forty, or eighty years, to discover and believe that you are a beloved child of God. The length of time doesn’t matter. You are sent into this world to believe in yourself as God’s chosen one and then to help your brothers and sisters know that they are also beloved sons and daughters of God who belong together.
Paul calls this reconciliation. This reality becomes more clear to me day by day and year by year:
You are sent to heal, to break down the walls between you and your neighbors, locally, nationally, and globally. Before all the distinctions, the separations, and the walls built on the foundations of fear, there was unity in the mind and heart of God. Out of that unity, you are sent into this world for a little while to claim that you and every other human being belong to that same God of Love who lives from eternity to eternity.
Paul says, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Death and its spiderweb of imagined horrors catch our faces and hair when we walk through the woods of the world. T.S. Eliot says simply, “In short, I was afraid.” His Prufrock doesn’t even dare to eat a peach, let alone follow the fact of God’s love to its conclusions. Will he find what Flannery O’Connor’s admirers call “an intuition of repentance?” – Richard Giannone, Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love, p. 6
Will Prufrock’s author become, in time, “a poet who finds (like O’Connor) within guilt and sorrow the love that does not end?” Eliot wrote his poem on aging when he was 23 years old. He still had plenty of time to discover his own ministry of reconciliation, and he did.
We all do.
Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have salvation and power come,
and the Kingdom of our God
and the authority of his Anointed One.”
 (Revelation 11, Psalm 45, 1 Corinthians 15, Luke 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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