Homily for Solemnity of the Assumption 2010

We gather as floods in Pakistan affect people who number more than the population of Australia and as another of our soldiers is killed in Afghanistan. So many deaths and injuries may cause us to question the value of the physical life we share.

We are all immersed in the sea of our culture. Everything that is not part of our personal biology can be seen as part of the culture in which we live. It constantly offers us the opportunity to make choices about our lives and what is important for us. In an age gone by when the surrounding culture only extended to the village or town in which people lived the choices and opportunities were few. We did not live then and it is very difficult for us to grasp the extent of the changed environment in which we now live. But even the difference between an age without TV or the Internet and our own is staggering.

Everything, literally everything in the world and universe, is potentially within our view and within our grasp. The choices and demands this places on us are immense. This struck me once when on the train travelling to the city. Every person around me under the age of thirty, it seemed, had either a mobile phone or a music player, and sometimes both, attached to their ear! Or they were plotting their present movements and feelings to friends via Facebook etc. There is a kind of a devotional life in young people as they listen repeatedly to the music they love and it's lyrics. They listen over and over again. It is almost like saying the Hail Mary's of the Rosary. The repetition gets it into the soul. They know and absorb the feelings, the values, and the excitement of a world whose possibilities are seemingly without limit. Any Church and any school are hard pressed to insert a different way of seeing things into the mix.

With experience and age some will come to see that even this culture with all its wonder has its limits and it's dark side. Yet, for all that, and even because of it, others are deeply spiritual. Not as we are familiar, perhaps, but they are faced with the same spiritual questions asked in a different way. Because it is all about relationships. Seeking love and intimacy, support and hope in our lives.

Mary's Assumption may reassure us. This feast is called the "Dormition", Mary's "falling asleep", in the Eastern Churches, where it is a major feast accompanied by weeks of fasting. "Falling asleep" is a beautiful phrase used by Jesus and St Paul to speak of death. We are so accustomed to think of the spiritual life being concerned with the soul and the soul's immortality. We can forget that the body and all the universe is part of the spiritual realm. The heart of Christian hope is the resurrection of the whole person and the bringing of all creation to God with Christ. For St Paul, the spiritual is not so much all that is not of the material world but all that exists by the Spirit of God including the material universe. The unspiritual, or "the flesh", is anything or anyone which does not live by the Spirit of God. Mary is spiritual above all, full of grace, as all she is is imbued by the Holy Spirit. She shares in the first fruits of the Resurrection of her son as the whole Church hopes to do.

The Incarnation, the Word of God becoming flesh amongst us, affirms both the goodness of all creation and the possibility of a relationship with God through those gifts of creation. God chose to enter into our limited fleshly world for the sake of a new creation. This is the foundation of the Sacraments as places of encounter with the divine. So unlike some Churches, the Catholic Church takes the material universe seriously. We do not reject it as though God is absent from it, even though it may seem like that at times. For us the whole world is ablaze with the grandeur of God.

The woman of the Apocalypse, giving birth to a son, is Israel bringing forth a Messiah. We can also see this woman as the Church, a new Israel, the mother of all believers, who bring Christ into the world. And we can, therefore, see this woman as the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, mother of the Church. In her Magnificat Mary personifies Israel. She speaks not just for herself but also for Israel of God's great mercy in sending a Messiah.

In the meeting of Mary with Elizabeth in the hill country of Judah, we witness the same kind of ordinary thing people do every day on their mobile phones or the internet. They are sharing the ordinary everyday events of their lives which are so often pregnant with grace if we can but recognise it like Elizabeth. We can affirm all the hopes and possibilities inherent in every person's life. We also believe that those hopes and possibilities can not be fulfilled within the limits of this world. For us, those limits, including death, as Paul says, will be destroyed by Christ, for those who belong to him. The Assumption assures us of Mary's declaration that God's mercy lasts forever.

Fr Graham