For most of us, somewhere in our heads is the constant question about what happens after we die. Every religion has to have answers to this ultimate question. Not so much why do we have to die but, what happens after death? Today’s feast is about what happens after death. It is also a key to what is happening in our life.
If you look at Mary's life as recorded in the Gospels there is nothing special about it. It is a life of faith, not vision. It is only Divine Revelation that lets us look at the hidden glory of her life. Revelation tells us that at her death she was assumed body and soul into heaven, the first person to share in the resurrection of Jesus.
Because of Christ's resurrection and Mary's Assumption, we have hope that our death is a beginning, but also that in our life we can look back from that vantage point and find the infinite in the finite. There is so much more going on in our life than we can see or understand or even imagine. When Mary conceived Jesus in her womb, she had a life within her life. Every woman who has conceived must have experienced this—a life within her life. This seems to be a model of Christian life: We have a life within our life. We have the life of God within our life. We have to be attentive to the life we bear, nurture it, and bring forth its fruit. Nothing is as it seems. Death is life, suffering is redemptive, mortality becomes immortality.
St. Thérèse is called the saint of the “little way,” the ordinary way, the nothing special way. One of her biographers says, "The uniqueness of Thérèse's message does not lie in what she confided to her loved ones, but in the fact that she dared to express it at all. Because of this, countless persons realize that this existence of theirs is a ' way' even a way of sanctity.”
Each of us has a “way” of life to be lived. It may not be dramatic, but it is a revelation of God's love for us. When St. Benedict died two monks saw a magnificent road covered with rich carpeting and glittering with thousands of lights. From the monastery, it stretched eastward in a straight line until it reached up into heaven. There in the brightness stood a man who told the monks this is the road taken by St. Benedict. We all have a road to travel, a way. It may seem ordinary but, hopefully, it leads to heaven and, someday, we may be able to look back and see how bright and beautiful the road really was.+
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