Misguided Assumption (Message)s

Last year around this time, I was sitting in church with something vaguely bothering me. It crept around in the shadows in the back of my mind, and then suddenly, the light switched on.

"The Assumption of Mary isn't in the Bible!" I told my cousins (once Mass was over).

"No!" they said.

Then we did that thing where you think back over what the readings were . . . and the Psalm was . . . geez, I was paying attention, wasn't I?

"Whoa," my cousins said.

The Feast of the Assumption can be an interestingly ambiguous time in some Catholic circles for precisely that reason. We might feel impelled to lay low until it's all safely over, perhaps shuffling our feet and whistling a bit, not entirely sure that if some Protestant leapt out brandishing the banner of Scripture-alone we might not scream and run rather than stand and engage. I mean, we've been so hip since the sixties. We're studying the Bible. We've got lay involvment (cough, preen). We're phasing out all those statues and incense and things that distract you from the Word. We're so far removed from the indulgence-vending, sign-believing Church of the Middle Ages. And then, every year, they spring this on us: a feast where the Scripture readings, at best, gesture very generally toward the event we're celebrating.

You can tell that not everyone is entirely comfortable with this: even the sermons get defensive. I've heard several that basically use this feast to focus on the importance of venerating tradition and believing things that aren't corroborated, talking about how wonderful and unique this feast is for us as Catholics, etc. To me, this is about as useful as leading off Trinity Sunday's preaching with a disclaimer about the dry topic matter--another mistake I've heard more than once and which simply scatters a great teaching opportunity to the winds. First of all, the defensive tack assumes that every parishioner is alert enough to note the discrepancy between pregnant Mary (in the Gospel we hear today) and the end-of-life Mary who rises to join Jesus in heaven. May I gently suggest that this isn't the case? The confusion over who exactly was the result of the Immaculate Conception perseveres for a reason. I bet there's a good cache of people who arrive happily accepting the Assumption and ready to hear a sermon about whatever the preacher chooses having to do with this mystery, perhaps including, but not limited to, the origin of this shared belief.

And for those souls who are clued in to the non-Biblical basis of the feast, will an exhortation to belief in the face of minimal evidence set them right, or just send their antennae up higher? I think it'll feed their doubt, and needlessly, in a protest-too-much kind of way. And Machiavelling the masses (or Masses, ho, ho, ho) aside, sticking to the one theme of unique Catholic tradition misses the many wonderful threads of wisdom that an Assumption sermon could take up. A traditionalist could talk about Mary's unique role as advocate and intercessor, or use the fact that Mary's body was not allowed to decay to teach on the confusing doctrine of the resurrection of the body or Catholic theology of the body in general. (And let this be done, please, without taking female sexual imagery back 100 years and negating John Paul II's worthy statements on woman's whole personhood.) Someone who loves the Biblical Mary could talk about her radical Magnificat view of the world and her involvement with Jesus' ministry. A sympathizer with anthropology or feminist theology might point out that the story of the Assumption invokes parallels between Mary and Jesus, the only two humans whose bodies, as well as souls, have passed to heaven. Almost anything about Mary would be welcome, and probably carry a relatively fresh and useful lesson. Many of the great Marian readings fall in Advent, when preachers may have other sermonical goals in mind, such as the postulate that Christmas materialism is not good. Let's give this feast to Mary, instead of signing it over to apology. If anyone jumps out at us to question its legitimacy, let's whack them with our handbags, and go look in the church basement for those statues. The people who carved them knew that if you focus on one holy thing, your mind will turn to other things of God--not a bad thing to keep in mind, before we dismiss any part of the liturgical year as esoteric.