“We’re particularly aware of the fragility of Creation, and how humanity’s hand has been heavy and harsh – not tilling the ground but taking it for granted.“
A brief homily from Fr Dean from the Assumptiontide celebrations on Sunday 13th August
If you’re looking for an experience of a lifetime, and have a few hundred thousand pounds to spare, you can take a trip to the edge of space and experience zero gravity. Just give Virgin Galactic a call, and you can be floating in space in no time at all.
One of the first to return from this experience last week talked of the memorable moment of seeing the earth from space, “The pure clarity was moving,” he said.
The imagery from the Book of Revelation (Rev 11:19ff) which places a woman on the moon, adorned with the sun, and wearing a crown of jewelled stars may seem rather futuristic, galactic almost, a super nova of divine proportions. But the colourful language runs deeper than the search for ‘what’s out there’. If we associate this figure with Mary, then this painting in words, this colourful poem expresses how she is illuminated and honoured, adorned by creation.
Her childbearing has changed the world. Her ‘Yes’ to God has begun to usher in a new creation as we try to make sense of the world in which we live, look for clarity in the midst of the chaos we’ve created.
God is never separate from his own Creation. It has, after all flowed from God’s heart, and in the Incarnation as God takes flesh from Mary and grows within her, God restores and affirms the dignity of all that he has made.
Today, we’re particularly aware of the fragility of Creation, and how humanity’s hand has been heavy and harsh – not tilling the ground but taking it for granted, disturbing and damaging, taking what we want rather than receiving with joy what we have been given, creating a chaos of Genesis proportions as we await the New Creation.
Whole peoples are displaced by the ravages of war and climate change, creating refugees for nations to squabble about – and come up with reasons why they can’t come here whilst all the time allowing the root problems to grow deeper. Towns and countries burn up, lives are lost, children cough themselves to death in polluted cities, plastic fills the seas, a fresh change from raw sewage.
Mary’s Assumption indicates the way that we should go, through lives of gentleness and love. To have a humility expressed not in some fluffy softness but with a steely determination, a confident faith, attentiveness to all that God desires, and a willingness to respond with a ‘Yes’
So Mary, whose life has been alive with God’s grace, is so valued and precious to God that every fabric of her being is immersed by the life of heaven, showing us the New Creation, the heavenly source and summit of our lives.
In an old Celtic poem, we have a reflection on death:
Who are waiting for me to die? Who are watching my failing body? There is the devil wanting to entice my soul to hell. There are my children wanting to inherit my land and gold There is the worm wanting to eat my rotting flesh And there is God wanting me to come back home.
There is purpose to our little lives. Perhaps this Feast today, gives us a moment of pure clarity, as we look to the life of Heaven, and a New Creation
Enter the Mystery 
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