Today the Church is filled with joy.
On this great Solemnity of the Assumption, we contemplate Mary taken body and soul into the glory of heaven, and we celebrate what God has accomplished in her. Yet the Assumption is not simply about where Mary has gone. It reveals something of what God desires to accomplish in each of us. In Mary we see the promise of the Resurrection already brought to fulfilment. We see a human life, completely open to grace, gathered at last into the fullness of life with Christ.
There is something wonderfully hopeful about that.
Our faith does not tell us that this earthly life is insignificant, or that our bodies and our ordinary human experiences are things ultimately to be discarded. Quite the opposite. God took flesh in Jesus Christ. Christ rose bodily from the dead. And today, in Mary, we see that God’s saving love embraces the whole person. Nothing that belongs truly to our humanity is beyond His desire to redeem and bring to fulfilment.
Saint Paul expresses it very simply in the second reading: “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of all who have fallen asleep.” Death does not have the final word. Christ does. And because Mary belongs entirely to Christ, His victory becomes her victory.
But if the readings ended there, we might be tempted to look upon Mary as someone very distant from us: clothed with the sun, crowned with stars, already sharing the glory of heaven.
Then the Gospel brings us somewhere very different.
It brings us to a road in the hill country.
Mary is travelling to the home of Elizabeth. There is no throne. No crown. No visible glory. There is simply a young woman carrying Christ within her and going to serve someone who needs her. Perhaps that tells us something essential about the Assumption.
The glory we celebrate today is the fulfilment of a life lived largely in hiddenness. Before the Assumption there was Nazareth. Before heavenly glory there were years of ordinary faithfulness. Before Mary was raised up, she had first learned to receive.
She received the Word of God. She carried Christ. She brought Him to others. She remained faithful. And God brought to completion what His grace had begun within her.
The Magnificat allows us to hear the heart from which that life was lived: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit exults in God my Saviour.”
Mary’s whole life proclaimed the greatness of the Lord. Today we celebrate the Lord bringing that life to its glorious fulfilment. The one who made herself small before God is raised up by Him. The woman who sought no glory for herself is gathered into the glory of her Son.
That is why Mary has always held such a special place within the Cistercian tradition. Our monastic fathers did not love her simply because of the extraordinary privileges God gave her. They recognised in her something of the vocation they themselves were seeking to live: humility, silence, receptivity, simplicity, and a heart wholly available to God.
Saint Bernard returned again and again to Mary because everything in her points beyond herself towards Christ. Her greatness lies precisely in allowing God to be great within her. Even the Magnificat is not a song about what Mary has achieved. It is a song about what God has done: “The Almighty has done great things for me. Holy is His name.”
Her joy is the joy of someone who knows that her life is held within a purpose greater than herself.
There is a particular reason why those words should touch us in this monastery today. The fifteenth of August has long held a special place in our monastic tradition as a day on which men began their monastic journey. Some of those beginnings are represented among us this morning. Men entered Roscrea, Mount Melleray and Mellifont in different generations, not knowing all that the years ahead would contain. And today that tradition continues, as a new member begins his monastic journey among us.
There is something especially beautiful about that on the Feast of the Assumption. Today we celebrate a journey completed in Mary, while among us another journey is just beginning.
And between beginning and fulfilment lies the mystery of vocation.
When someone begins a vocation, he cannot know what the years ahead will bring. The young men who entered on this feast in 1946, 1952, 1956, 1966, 1979, 1991, and 1997 could not have known where their monastic journeys would lead them. They could not have foreseen the brothers with whom they would live, the work they would be asked to undertake, the joys they would receive, the losses they would endure, or the ways in which their monasteries themselves would change.
They simply began. And then they began again the following morning. And the morning after that.
Perhaps that is how every vocation is really lived.
We sometimes imagine vocation in terms of great decisions: the day of entry, the day of profession, ordination, marriage, or some other defining moment. Those days matter. We remember them and rightly give thanks for them. But a vocation is actually formed through thousands of much smaller acts of fidelity.
Getting up and beginning again.
Returning to prayer.
Doing the work entrusted to us.
Learning to forgive.
Allowing ourselves to be forgiven.
Remaining when remaining is difficult.
Serving when no one notices.
Trusting God when we cannot see very far ahead.
Mary knew that kind of fidelity.
Her fiat at Nazareth was spoken once, but it had to be lived many times.
She said yes when Gabriel came.
She said yes on the road to Elizabeth.
She said yes through the hidden years of Nazareth.
She said yes when she could not understand everything her Son was doing.
She said yes beneath the Cross.
And the God to whom she entrusted herself remained faithful to her.
That is why today’s feast speaks not only to monks or religious. It speaks to every Christian. Each of us has a vocation. Each of us has received a life which can become an offering to God. For one person that offering is made through marriage and family; for another through priesthood or religious life; for another through years of caring for someone they love; through work faithfully undertaken; through friendship; through suffering patiently borne; through ageing; through prayer hidden from everyone except God.
Most Christian lives will never appear extraordinary.
Neither did most of Mary’s.
Yet today’s feast tells us that nothing given to God in love is ever lost.
Every hidden act of kindness.
Every prayer whispered when we are tired.
Every act of forgiveness.
Every sacrifice quietly made.
Every time we begin again.
Grace is gathering all of it into something whose fullness we cannot yet see.
In that sense, the Assumption is not only a privilege bestowed upon Mary. It is also a kind of prophecy. In her, God allows us to glimpse beforehand the destiny He desires for His people. Mary has reached the fulfilment towards which the whole Church is still travelling.
And perhaps this is the deepest joy of today’s feast.
Mary shows us that God does not abandon what He begins.
We are unfinished people. We know our weaknesses, our inconsistencies, and the distance that still remains between the people we are and the people God calls us to become. Sometimes we may wonder whether very much is changing at all. But the Christian life is not ultimately founded upon our ability to perfect ourselves. It is founded upon the faithfulness of God.
What God begins in grace, He intends to bring to glory.
Mary is the great sign of that promise.
She does not stand before us today simply so that we may admire her from a distance. She stands within the communion of saints as our Mother and our sister in faith, showing us what it means to allow God to complete His work.
The Magnificat therefore becomes our song as well.
The God who looked upon the lowliness of His servant still looks upon the smallness of our lives.
The God who did great things for Mary is still at work.
The God who raised Christ from the dead has not abandoned His creation.
And the God who brought Mary’s life to its glorious fulfilment has prepared for us a home in which nothing that has been truly given in love will ever be lost.
So today we rejoice.
We rejoice with Mary.
We rejoice in the victory of Christ.
We rejoice in the vocations that began on this feast many years ago and in the fidelity that has sustained them.
We rejoice in the new beginning among us today.
And we rejoice because all our beginnings, all our years of ordinary fidelity, and all our hopes ultimately rest in the hands of a God who is faithful.
Today we look towards Mary and see not someone removed from us, but someone who has already reached the home towards which we are travelling.
She has completed the journey we are still making.
May she teach us to receive Christ as she received Him, to carry Him as she carried Him, to serve as she served, and to remain faithful as she remained faithful.
And through her maternal intercession, may the work God has begun in each of us, quietly and patiently through grace, be brought one day to its fullness in the joy and glory of His Kingdom.
Amen.