The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Reflection
Painted by Titian
SEEING THROUGH THE MOTHERS’ EYES – The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary –
Luke 1:39-56
As we gaze on Mary’s son, Jesus, through the eyes of Mary’s heart, there is a softening that happens; we feel that love, we remember this love; it is the foundation experience of a child’s gaze.
Today we celebrate the great feast of this daughter of Eve, the chosen spouse of the Holy Spirit, and the God-Bearer, being assumed into heaven, into the Godhead itself.
This is the highest vantage point and gives us a new perspective of that matrix of life; reflecting the Love of God, the Love of Christ, and the Love of the Holy Spirit through the lens of a mother’s heart. This is the new matrix proclaimed by Jesus. This is the transformation of consciousness, the founding of God’s kingdom, a new order based on justice, mercy, inclusivity; this is Love. We are born of Love. Love is our mother.
A new understanding that Jesus himself noted is beyond the comprehension of the powerful and the clever. This is a wisdom that cannot be made apparent through the warrior nature of death, through our drive to succeed and to win, or even through our quest for knowledge.
This is the new understanding given to children who gaze into a mother’s eyes and know Love through their needing and their trust.
It is not any particular heroic path of suffering that merits our righteousness, it is only by caressing the hand and shoulder of our beloved that our journey together gifts us with righteousness. Rather than carrying the cross after Jesus to salvation through sharing in his suffering and death, we are called to a relationship with Jesus as the way of journeying in righteousness without any appropriation, being dependent on God.
When St Francis of Assisi heard the gospel on taking nothing for the journey, he was overjoyed.
As his patron, Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis attempts to live the polarity between maintaining what we have in service of the mission of the gospel and ministering in openness to the newness of the Holy Spirit and the emergent and ever new summons of the moment.
In our structures and institutions or in our mental constructs of theologies and doctrines, we are always tempted to ‘inverted awe.’ That is awe of our own creations and thoughts rather than of God’s. Faith is always in God, not in what we already know and believe. Faith is not a ‘thought.’ It is action and practice as the ‘Way, the Truth, and the Life’.
The love of a mother always points beyond herself to the child; this is true Love that we are invited into as we gaze through the Mother’s eyes of the heart. This is not in our hands to appropriate; it is always grace.
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