Honoring the Queen of Heaven
“Today the choirs of fiery spirits look upon our own nature, made of clay, and tremble.” (from an Armenian hymn for the Feast of the Assumption)
On August 15th, the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Assumption. On this day, we rejoice “that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory” (Pius XII).
The liturgy for this feast contains a rich web of Scriptural texts, taken from both the Old and New Testaments. At Lauds, we address Mary as “Daughter of Zion…fair as the moon, resplendent as the rising sun,” combining the prophetic exhortation to “rejoice, O Daughter Zion,” with the praises of the Song of Songs (see Zechariah 9:9, Song of Songs 6:9). At Mass, the first reading describes the “woman clothed with the sun,” an apocalyptic image of both Mary and the Church (Revelation 12:1). Her appearance immediately after the “ark of the covenant” in the heavenly temple suggests an association between Mary and the Ark (Revelation 11:19).
The biblical image of Mary as the Ark is most clearly on display in the Gospel reading, from Luke’s account of the Visitation. When Mary enters the house of Elizabeth and Zechariah, John the Baptist “leaps for joy” in his mother’s womb (Luke 1:44), just as King David had danced for joy while the Ark of the Covenant was being brought into Jerusalem (II Samuel 6:14). Although Elizabeth initially wonders, “How does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me,” Mary chooses to stay with her for the next three months (Luke 1:43, 56). In a similar tone, King David had asked, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me,” choosing instead to let it rest in another man’s house for three months (II Samuel 6:9-11).
As the Ark, Mary was taken up into the holy city at the end of her earthly life. In his commentary on the Hail Mary, St. Thomas Aquinas associates Mary’s bodily assumption with a verse from the Psalms: “Go up, Lord, to the place of your rest, you and the ark of your strength” (Psalm 132:8). As one hymn for the Assumption puts it, she is “the ark which God has sanctified,” and now she dwells forever in the temple of the heavenly Jerusalem.
In one of his homilies for the Feast of the Assumption, Blessed Isaac of Stella, a 12th-century Cistercian monk and theologian, writes: “Today, then, Mary went up from the desert of this world, not without astounding the heavenly powers, who had never before seen anyone fly from this world and surpass all their choirs and thrones in such a fashion.” A true son of St. Bernard, who was known for his Marian devotion and for his allegorical commentaries on the Song of Songs, Isaac applies to Mary the verse: “Who is this who has come up from the desert?” (Song of Songs 8:5) He imagines these words being spoken by the choirs of angels, as they behold the Blessed Virgin Mary ascending from the desert of her earthly pilgrimage and being placed above them in the glory of Heaven.
What we celebrate in the Assumption is not for Mary alone; since she is both symbol and pre-eminent member of the whole Body of Christ, “we can see in Mary what is to come for the Church” (Hugo Rahner). Mary is a sign of the whole Church’s destiny, which—in her—has already begun to be fulfilled. (Pace Miley Cyrus, maybe it is about what’s waiting on the other side.) She is “the image and beginning of the Church which will be brought to perfection in the future age, while for those on earth, until the day of the Lord comes, she shines forth as a sign of sure hope and consolation for the pilgrim People of God” (Lumen Gentium 68).
Queen assumed into Heaven, pray for us!