The ascent to Heaven of the Virgin Mary is the reward of a life entirely devoted to the service of God and of men, especially the weakest. First disciple of her Son in excellence, it was fitting that the Virgin should share with him the glory of the resurrection.
The Assumption of the Virgin, her ascent to celestial glory at the end of her existence, represents the crowning of her fidelity. God takes his servant with Him to heaven because she always wanted to join Jesus, not to escape from this world but to join the one she loved more than anything and to whom she remained attached throughout her life. existence. As such, the Assumption represents the fruit of fidelity. This is a very useful lesson in these times when the libertarian ideology makes the apology of emotional fluttering or ideological relativism.
Loyalty, a virtue for nerds?
The Virgin remained faithful throughout her life. However, fidelity is not a trivial virtue! Faithful to her Son at the foot of the Cross, while events persisted in contradicting the messiah and the divinity of Jesus, Mary demonstrated that remaining attached to God required strength, courage and also a great deal of spiritual intelligence. Fidelity has never been a virtue for people who are fearful and confined to an outdated piety and preserved from the pitfalls of existence! At the end of her earthly journey, the unfailing attachment of the Virgin to the Gospel is crowned by her assumption into celestial glory.
The Assumption puts before our eyes the greatness of a life built on coherence, love, fidelity, strength.
This mystery thus gives us a very useful lesson about the coherence between saying and doing. Indeed, our society lives under the illusion of reconciling opposites: excessive sex and family life, love and inconstancy, duration and zapping, the violence of video games and the haunting exhortations to peace. society, the incongruities of certain sexual mores that upset millennia of traditions and wisdom, and the chin-banging calling for respect for authority. Faced with such trickery, the Assumption puts before our eyes the greatness of a life built on coherence, love, fidelity, strength, constancy in trials, finally on faith in God.
The Virgin Mary, a passionate
The Assumption above all illustrates the force of love as passion, incandescent force, fire. No one better than this mystery of the ascent of the Virgin into Heaven sheds more light on these words of Jesus: “It is a fire that I have come to cast on earth” (Lk 12, 49). Let’s stop painting the Virgin as a cutesy being, a sugar statue, a marshmallow figure!
If our late modernity delights in glamor and its superficiality, on the other hand love in its Christian version is a force capable of moving mountains. Marie was passionate, and it is as such that she joined the Trinity. Our hedonistic society suffocates love with its idolatry of sex. Christian love is a fire, not rose water or a license to tarnish the mystery of sexual difference by serious breaches of chastity.
The power of loyalty
Finally, Mary’s ascent into heaven remains a powerful stimulus for faith in the just reward of works. God takes Mary with Him as much out of justice as out of mercy. The demon never had a hold on her. There was never in her any complicity with evil. This is the reason why she is empowered to lead the fight against the dark forces. Satan has no allies in this stronghold that is the faithful Virgin, “terrible as an army arrayed in battle” according to the expression of the Song (Ct 6, 10). Mary leads God’s battles with all the more energy because no one fights better than a mother for the life of her children. It remains the sure bulwark against the culture of death conveyed by certain ideologies.
The fidelity of the Virgin not only won Heaven for her, but above all constitutes one of the cardinal virtues by which she exercises her maternal office towards us in her glorious condition – fidelity on which the disciples of Jesus lean to pray to her to intercede with him on their behalf.
In pictures, the most beautiful representations of the Assumption:
