Assumption Of The Blessed Virgin Mary
Franciscan Reflections From The Hermitage – (Luke 1:39-56)
God makes a promise, proclaims it, and Holy Scripture, God’s Word affirms it: It is the woman who will crush the head of evil and deceit that brings disintegration and death.
Today Mary, daughter of Eve, the Theotokos, the God-Bearer, confirms God’s promise in her great gospel prophecy: the Empire of the God of War, the Death Bringer, is to be thrown down from its’ throne of power, together with the proud dynasties, all the victors of war who have forced the vanquished into oppression. This is the great prophecy of the God-bearer, that Love vanquishes evil. This mother’s Love will replace death by birthing the seed of her womb.
Today we celebrate the great feast of this daughter of Eve, spouse of the Holy Spirit, the God-Bearer, being assumed into heaven, into the Godhead itself. This gives us a new perspective of that matrix of life that reflects 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, the transformation of consciousness, the founding of God’s kingdom, and a new order based on justice, mercy, inclusivity, and 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 manifest through the warrior nature, through our drive to succeed and to win, or even through our quest for knowledge. This is the new image given to children who gaze into a mother’s eyes and know Love through their need and their trust.
Canterbury Cathedral, at night; a little pilgrimage to experience the city lights flowing in through the beautiful stained-glass windows into the darkened cathedral. A magical experience of dancing colours retelling the story of God’s journey with his people. There the Anglican woman priest in charge of the cathedral tells her own story of this love experience; holding up the bread of the Eucharist for the first time with the words, “This Is My Body”. This is the connectedness of a love bond giving birth to new life, “you in me and I in you”. When God speaks, it is and it has being; it is God’s embodiment into every time and all space; from the primordial black abyss of ‘nothingness’, God is ‘Birther of the Cosmos’.
Why then have we silenced these voices in the gatherings of the community? Why have we excluded these from their role as God-bearers at the table of the Lord? How much of God remains veiled because of these exclusions?
When the feminine guides the masculine, masculinity’s actions become more moderated, softer, and more humane… far more trustworthy. Without this feminine guidance, our male anxiety and fear of losing control lead us into those compulsive actions that must always seek to dominate.
Feminine guidance must be applied as we seek new solutions to the crisis facing our stumbling church and the earth’s suffering.
As in heaven, so on earth! Our patriarchal deity has led us to an earthly culture of batterers enforcing what we want through will and power. All those holy wars continue to tear our world apart.
Our move to a new structure must embrace this Love to replace power, freedom to replace control, and liberation to replace exclusion and oppression.
Any continued denial of the feminine within the patriarchal Deity will only lead to further dysfunction, wrath, judgement, ignorance, jealousy, division, and segregation that feed the darkness of evil that both craves and canonises war, death, and annihilation.
Mary, our mother, assumed into heaven, give us the necessary courage to divest ourselves of those privileges and those exclusive rights that separate and dominate, especially the rights associated with those separated and ‘raised to the dignity of the priesthood’.
Give us a taste of that wondrous beauty that is the intrinsic dignity of each and every man and woman, and in every child made in your image. Give us a taste of that wondrous beauty that is intrinsic to all of creation, intrinsic to every animal, to all the rivers and mountains, to the forests and the seas.
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