I am generally quite uncurious about details, whether it be reading the fifty page contracts you are emailed to buy a phone or lists of allergens on labels – I have little interest in them. When I am asked the usual question now ‘do you have any allergies’, I generally answer ‘yes, I have an allergy to small portions and inflated prices’ – but this can sometimes confuse the limited number of brain cells of the staff member, so I just say ‘no’. It’s easier. The same with people – some people ask you every detail of your life, but I have never felt that way inclined, people present as who they are, and I have only a limited memory anyway, and once divulged, people can get upset if you forget what they have told you. What do we need to know about each other though? We can know quite a lot about an individual, and not know them. This is true, for both individuals and people often in the news. And we’ve all found ourselves saying something like: I’ve heard so much about you, and now I am looking forward to getting to know you. No amount of knowledge about someone can be the same as knowing them, but knowing certain things as true about someone can make us want to know them or to know them better. Facts can attract. They help us find people like us – and unless you are a vegan, people are unlikely to know much about you, for it is only vegans who define themselves by their peculiar aversion to natural food and reliance on concocted food shaped items. 

This kind of ordinary, everyday questioning could be a good starting point in celebrating the Assumption of Mary, Our Lady. To know that Mary was assumed into heaven cannot remain as just one more fact that we know about her. Knowing this truth about Mary, affects how we relate to her, and it is an invitation to relate to her more deeply and with even greater joy. What do we know about Mary? Was she a Vegan? Did she have an allergy to celery? 

We believe that Mary, the immaculate Mother of God, is assumed body and soul, that her whole person is in heaven together with Jesus Christ. All this means that we are invited to a unique kind of relationship with her of the kind not possible with any other saint in heaven. This is what we know about her. 

It is not that Mary is around 2000 years old in earthly time, but invisibly and without feeling her age. In a God-granted, gracious way Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory. This relates her to Jesus Christ in a special way, as she did in becoming his mother. Mary’s bond to Christ is without parallel, physically and spiritually, in body and soul. Jesus did not have a biological father, he did not become one flesh with a woman in marriage, he had no children. His is a unique bodily bond to his mother. She also related to him uniquely in her soul, spiritually in faith and immaculately without sin and full of grace. Details do not matter, as I keep on assuring our Finance committee. What matters is our relationship to God, through Mary and each other. What we know is that there is salvation. What we do not know is how we will pay the builders. Some things matter, some do not. 

As Mary relates to Christ in a uniquely glorious way, she draws us closer to him and to each other. She draws us closer to Christ because the two of them are so close, and we can hardly know Mary without knowing her Son and God. A devotion to Mary that does not lead us to Christ or fails to make us aware of our common dependence on him cannot be a full devotion.
The centre of our Christian hope is not so much that our souls will be in heaven, though that will be a great joy in itself. Our God-given hope is that we will be resurrected bodily. The liturgy makes us attentive to these realities, and this attentiveness spills over into our personal prayer life and our behaviour towards others. Our deepest hope is shaped by what has happened to Mary. We know this about Mary, so therefore we know it of ourselves – that there is hope, that there is love, that there is life everlasting. 

Christian hope does not only point to the kind of future awaiting us but also affects how we live and behave now. Hope is not cosmic fantasy or wishful thinking. It is for real, for real people in a real world. Grace is given to us for struggle, the struggle against all that diminishes our humanity and that of others. Importantly therefore grace is given us to struggle against sin and against death. The more we relate to Mary assumed by God body and soul into heavenly glory, the greater will be our commitment to resisting all the ways that here on earth bodies and souls can be disfigured. The closer we are to her, the closer we are to Her Son, and the closer we are to Him, the closer we are to heaven.