Rising with Mary: The Assumption of Our Blessed Mother (Rebroadcast)

In our meditation of the week, Fr. Javier del Castillo reflects on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and how she helps us to rise up to Heaven in our daily lives. For St. Josemaria, the Assumption or the Dormition of Our Lady played a vital role in his life as a young boy in Barbastro, Spain. St. Josemaria’s devotion to Our Lady became so great that he wished to “rise up” to Heaven with Mary by clinging to the tassel of her cloak in an effort to bring a piece of Heaven to Earth.

Fr. Javier invites us to look to Mary who teaches us that the essence of bringing Heaven to Earth lies in our ability to rise above challenges and adversities. By following her example, we can forgive even the unforgivable, serve others selflessly, and rise above our own tiredness and hardships. Mary's life exemplifies humility and the power of faith, showing us how to bring Christ's presence into our daily actions. As we emulate Mary's virtues and focus on the needs of others, we can transform our lives and actions, creating a piece of Heaven on Earth.

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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I beg your pardon for my sins and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my Father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. For today the Virgin Mother of God was assumed into heaven as the beginning and image of your church's coming to perfection, and the sign of sure hope and comfort to your pilgrim people. Rightly you would not allow her to see the corruption of the tomb, since from her own body she marvelously brought forth your incarnate son, the author of all life. Thus reads the preface of today's mass in this day of the assumption of Mary, of our own mother, who is in heaven, body and soul. This dogma that we profess with a Catholic and firm faith was proclaimed by Pius XII on november first, nineteen fifty. In this preface it is beautifully summarized. The Virgin Mother of God was assumed into heaven as the beginning and image of the church. She is the first one to be redeemed in Christ. And she was redeemed in the merits of Christ in a way that was exceptional, because she did not have original sin, and all because of the mission that our Lord had in store for her from even as Saint Paul says, even before the foundation of the world, to be holy, to be pure in his sight and his love. The dogma declares that it professes that she is there in heaven with our Lord, with God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in body and soul, as Pius the Twelfth said, after having completed the course of her earthly life. Many artists have depicted this mystery, especially in medieval times. They they depict it depict it in two scenes. The first scene is when Mary dies or she is dormant, she is lying in state, as it were, and next to her bed are the twelve apostles. And they are all sad because Mary has left them. But then Jesus is somehow depicted in the middle, looking straight with a little girl, kind of like a baby girl that he has in his arms. And that little girl represents the soul of Mary that he has come to pick up and take her to heaven. And that represents the first stage of death, kind of the soul that is redeemed and picked up by Jesus himself. And then in another scene, artists usually depict the empty tomb of Mary, perhaps with flowers, and with the twelve apostles looking down at the tomb in awe. And Mary's body taken up into heaven with angels. It really is a beautiful scene in body and soul. And the angels, as Saint Josemaria had this insight in his book, The Holy Rosary, when he contemplates the mystery of the Assumption, he says that the angels are so impressed at her beauty because she is arrayed in beautiful garments with beautiful virtues that they say, Who is she? Who is she? Another insight to explain this point of how beautiful Mary must have been upon entering into heaven, how beautiful she must have been in her body and of course in her soul to the angels, because she is the queen of angels, she is higher in glory, not in nature, but in glory, to all the angels. And that must be amazing. His insight was that in contemplating the scene of St. Luke's gospel of the prodigal son, how the prodigal son is given everything back. He has sinned, he has wasted away his inheritance, he has desired even you could say the death of his father, after all, that is what he implied when he said that he wanted his inheritance at that point. Well, when he comes back, he is arrayed with the best garment that his father had. He is given the ring, which represents his affiliation to or his belonging to the family. He gets sandals for his feet, he gets the hug, he gets the kiss, he gets everything back, the symphony, the fatted calf, and and the whole lot of being a son with all the rights and duties that he would have otherwise forfeited had he not come back. Well, St. Isama says in his homily on the assumption, in his book Christ is passing by, if God does that for a sinner, if he arrays the sinner in beautiful garments, basically the garment of the virtues and you know the forgiveness of sins and mercy and makes them come back to the state of grace. Well, how much more Mary, who did not sin at all, would be arrayed in the beauty of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity upon entering heaven. Truly the title greater than you, no one but God belongs to Mary. Well, Saint Josemaria was very fond of the Our Lady of the Assumption ever since he was a little kid. He would go into the chapel of the cathedral in Barbastro, and he would look at an image there of Mary asleep, Mary of the Dormition. And he liked this image so much that he had the image replicated in one of the chapels that he eventually built in Rome in Villa Tevre, where he lived and died, and very close to the crypt where he is where he was buried originally, and the church where he is now buried. The dormition is something that for St. Jose Maria took him back to his youth, took him back to when he was a little boy. And that's why also in his book, The Holy Rosary, he has a another insight of becoming a child and holding on to the tassel of or the tail of Mary's cloak as she ascends into heaven, so that we too can be lifted up. We too can rise with her, as it were, if we are united to her by holding on to the tassel of her blue cloak. What a great image. Why has Mary been raised to such heights? And we too, because we are her children. Because this mystery is the triumph of God's power in a humble soul. Today we are celebrating not what she has done, but what she has let God do in her. She is not the sun, but she is arrayed with the sun, as we read in today's first reading from the apocalypse. She is the woman clothed with the sun. And she reflects the image of God because she has let him do in her. That's in fact what she says in the Magnificant, which we read in today's gospel. My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God, my Savior, because He has regarded the lowliness of His handmaid. The lowliness of Mary. Mary does not consider herself anything special. She is a simple servant, the servant of the Lord. But her greatness lies in the fact that she let God do. She got out of the way and she gave him permission. And that's why she is exalted above every other generation. Henceforth, all generations shall call me blessed. That's not a statement of pride. It is a statement of humility, confessing God's power and what he can do in humble people. Mary said fiat in Latin. Let it be, not faciam, or I will do it. You know, I will do something. As if it were up to her. What great lessons we can learn from her, let it be done unto me, you know, her expression that she used in order to let God into her life. Because it really is about Christ, not us. This is all summarized in the letter of St. John, the first letter of Saint John, where he says that love, and he's referring to the love of God, really does not consist in what in that we have loved God, and we have done this and we have done that, but in that God has first loved us. It really is God's work in us, not our own. Not our own. She has basically brought heaven to earth. She has brought Jesus to earth. And we could think that what Jesus would later say to the apostles and to each one of us at the Last Supper, that Mary said to Jesus first of all at the Annunciation, I am going to prepare a place for you so that where I am you also may be. Basically, that's what Mary said. I'm going to prepare, or I'm prepared, Lord, for you to come into my heart, so that where I am, you also may be. I am going to make my little home, a little abode. Prepare a place, prepare an abode so that you can you can be here with me. Not only in my mind, not only in my heart, not only in my womb, not only in the manger, but in my very person, in every aspect of my life. And in you know, from now on, forever. And that's exactly what Mary did. That's what she did with her fiat. She brought heaven to earth by preparing this place for our Lord in her heart. Obviously, that is a grace, not something that she did primarily, but something that she corresponded to. That's with her fiat, but with God's fiat, we could say. Jesus brings earth to heaven today. And that's what he does at the Assumption. He brings Mary, the lowly handmaid, you know, the humble handmaid, basically earth, earth. She is made out of earth, you know, her body even to heaven. And that little piece of earth, you know, that that he blew into, as Genesis would describe, you know, the coming of life, of mankind, is now gonna be in heaven. There's a body, a human body, even in heaven today, with with the Holy Trinity. And that's and that's exactly what what uh what we celebrate today. It's this Jesus' power to bring earth to heaven and glorify it. And all because of his almighty power and Mary's uh you know getting out of the way and giving him permission. That's what we read in in the Apocalypse, that the devil is there waiting for the the dragon, waiting for the woman who is arrayed with the sun, waiting for her to give birth so that he can kill the child, and and you know, and and go after the woman and fight with the woman. But the woman flees into the wilderness where she has a place prepared by God that there may nourish her a thousand two hundred and sixty days. It's a symbolic number, but the important thing is that God prepared a place for her, and that's the place in heaven we can think, that she now enjoys and that we now profess in this dogma of faith that we are celebrating. Blessed truly is she who believed that the promises made to her, this glorification, would come true, would be fulfilled. And the question I think that we obviously have to ask ourselves is do we believe? Do we believe that we are going to share in the same glorious fate as our very mother? As our very own mother. Which means that, you know, d will we cling to her tassel, to the tassel of her cloak? Will we cling to that through faith? So that we can be lifted up with her. How do we do that? How do we do what she did so that Jesus can do what he did to her? In other words, how do we bring heaven to earth so that Jesus can bring us earth, the poor dust that we are? You know, the same as you are dust, lowly and dirty, you know. But if the Holy Spirit lifts you up with the with his wind and makes you shine like gold or like the sun with the rays of the sun, that's because of his power, not because of our own power. Well, how do we do that? How do we bring heaven to earth? Well, I'm thinking that, if I may suggest, that that we can rise above certain things with Mary. Can we rise above, for instance, humiliation? You know, Mary was humiliated at the foot of the cross. Can we rise above that with Mary by forgiving? You know, that truly is you know clinging on to her tassel and rising with her. Which, you know, it it truly is bringing Jesus present with the attitude that we have as Christians of forgiveness, where no one thinks of ever forgiving because it's impossible to forgive because they don't deserve forgiveness. Well, that's precisely when we Christians can come in and forgive. Can we do that? Can we rise above humiliations? Can we rise above the hard justice that is due to the people that hurt us through forgiveness? Or for instance, can we rise above another type of humiliation? For instance, serving, taking the worst for ourselves, the worst tasks at home. You know, can we serve without without feeling like you know we are not appreciated, or we are, you know, we are less than this kind of service is less is less than our dignity, you know, calls for, or why am I cleaning a bathroom, or why well can we serve as a gift, with the logic of a gift, you know, at home? This truly is bringing heaven to earth because when we keep a a cheerful, a bright and cheerful, orderly home, and we order, not because we we are maniacs of order, but because we do it as an act of love, then we truly be bring heaven to earth for others. We make we make an abode, literally, for our loved ones. You know, or or cleaning a table. We are not uh beyond these tasks ever, ever, ever, ever. Can we rise above our tiredness? That's another another thing that we see Mary do all the time. At the visitation, for instance, she she must have been tired, she was pregnant, she but she runs to visit her cousin Elizabeth. She doesn't care. She's thinking about her, not about her cousin, not her own self and her own tiredness and her own thirst and her own hunger, nothing. It's I gotta go and serve. Just like Jesus when, you know, uh St. Mark says he didn't even have time to eat. An amazing line, you know, Jesus didn't have time to eat. Well, the thing is, Jesus could have at a snap of a finger, he could have said, okay, everybody's cured right now because I gotta eat. I don't have time to impose my hands on each one of you, okay? Because there are too many of you, there's thousands of you. So just boom, you're all cured now. And then I have half an hour to eat, you know. No, he wanted to impose his hands on each one of them. Why? Why? Because it's the human touch, it's that special human touch. Touch where he notices every person. It's not there's no cookie cutter kind of way of saving people. It's each one has his or her moment with Christ, you know, personal. It's not okay, everybody is, you know, collective absolution. Everybody, okay, that's it. No, everyone has the encounter with Christ personally. That's the the beauty of what Christ does. And he goes hungry. You know, it really is interesting. He wants to go hungry because he wants to show how much he cares, how much he loves. And he rises above his tiredness. He rises above. Can I rise above? This is truly, you know, bringing heaven to earth. And at the same time, we rise with Mary. We are lifted up. We are exalted. Because we have chosen the way of humility. Taking care of people, being there for them, listening to them, giving them our attention, our undivided attention, how difficult that is sometimes. Or another way that we can rise above is rising above suffering, like galumni. Saint of Marisa is an example of this. In fact, today, in 1951, he was um he was suffering a lot. He suffered a persecution. Basically, somebody high up in the Curia or people in the Curia, good people, cardinals, ecclesiastics, they were plotting against Opus Dei, for whatever reason. They wanted to get rid of Saint Josemaria as the head and divide the men's branch and the women's branch into two separate religious orders. And of course, Opus Dei is not a religious order, but they didn't understand that. And they didn't understand how there could be men and women with complete separation of apostolates and and day-to-day living under the same head. And Saint Osemaria was tipped off by blessed Cardinal Schuster of Milan, that there was something going on and that he should watch out. So I will turn to my mother in heaven. And he went to Loreto in a pilgrimage to consecrate Opus Dei to her. And then he wrote a letter to the Pope, and the calumny stopped. And the Pope realized what was going on and he stopped it. This is rising above contradiction, setback with faith. Do you believe? Do you believe this is rising, truly rising, uh, with Mary? And it's not easy, you know. I it's very impressive how Mary never complains with Joseph about going to Egypt and coming back and doing this, and you know, new language, new culture, new whatever. No, she doesn't complain. She rises above all those contradictions. Can I do that? Can I imitate her? This is this is how we can participate in the assumption, if there's any way, you know, is be being more heavenly, being more more concerned about heavenly things, about uh uh uh about the needs of others and not my own. Mary dubbed that, you know, um, all the time. And she's worried about even not only the absolute needs of others, but what they don't need. And what could be kind of a nice gift for them, you know, like the wine at Cana. It's kind of running out. Well, if they didn't have wine, you know, in the history of the world, would it have made any difference that they that one party in Cana didn't have wine? No. No. This is an extra, totally quote-unquote useless. You know, nothing would have changed. But Mary thinks it's important because she needs to express her love for people, and she brings a little bit of heaven to them, you know, by twisting Jesus' arm and saying, Jesus, you know, they have no wine. You know, and telling servants, just do what he tells you. And he just doesn't have a choice, he just has to do it. You know. Well, Mary rises above, you know, the the the efficiency syndrome of, you know, just doing the bare minimum so that people can can survive or whatever. No, she goes extra. She goes way overboard. And we have to learn that too, because we have we too have to show our love in doing something more than what is required. Doing something extra. That's how we rise above. That's what heaven is like. Everybody's concerned about others and not about themselves. Well, as we finish our prayer today, let us turn to her and ask her to take all our prayers, all our deeds, and bring them and us, each one of us to heaven with her son, so that all our good actions and ourselves can be transfigured. And this can be done if we believe. Do you believe? Do I believe? Like our lady, blessed are we if we do. I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations which you have communicated to me in this meditation. I ask your help to put them into effect. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.