ASSUMPTION OF THE NATION

ASSUMPTION OF THE NATION 

BODY VIRGINAL

Mary’s surrender to God’s will was so complete that her Son pointed her body in the direction of his own Resurrection. With the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception, the dogma of the Assumption was already hovering in the wings. In speaking about the Blessed Virgin Mary we should be sparing in the use of superlatives, as though the example of her life were an unattainable ideal. Artistic interpretations of the Assumption tend to give an impression of the remoteness of an idyllic parable of the Virgin being swept up to an ethereal world far removed from human concerns.  We cannot understand Mary except within the whole drama of salvation in which Mary was intimately involved. “Drama” may well be a large word and fail to convey the grimy drabness of daily living and the dreariness of dying.

BODY ECCLESIAL

Mary is now more personally present to men and women than during her earthly life, not as an alabaster-type Madonna but a woman of strength, inured to suffering by knowing what it felt like to be a displaced person and to experience the violent loss of a well-beloved son. How many today have not felt the same? Indeed, her mother love was extended to the entire world at the time of her deepest pain on Calvary. It is hardly consistent she should remain up and away in glory while her children are even today being torn apart by violence and moral suicide, or that she should be unconcerned at the sensual cult of the body, that measures progress by the success in avoiding pain and putting off death, and marked by the mad scramble for the best places in this life and an alarming reluctance to leave it.

BODY POLITIC

As Christians and as a nation we need to consider the prospect that whatever happened to Jesus and Mary must also happen to us, but only in the measure of our humble obedience to God. “We rise by self-abasement” (Blessed Cardinal J. H. Newman). “The image and likeness of God” is not a static endowment but a gift with a dynamic purpose and intent. As surely as God entered the portals of humanity, the Indian nation must acquiesce in the incarnational mystery of its assumption to Jesus Christ who is as broad as creation and as transcendent as heaven. Every man and woman bears the mystery of Christ in their heart. This is what constitutes their call to holiness within their historic-political situation, which they answer by a life of self-effacing charity and justice. “Christ is now at work in the hearts of men” (Vat II, GS 38).

 There is a special power in certain past events, like the Freedom struggle, that no measure of temporal passage can erase. The energy released from such events continues to activate the human community and to influence the conditions of political decisions. This power is gathered up and personalised in Jesus Christ, the source and sustainer of such power, since his own paschal event is the résumé of all events, before and after. Those who submit with him in the cause of justice leave their mark on the nation’s history and have their names writ indelible in the Book of the Lamb.