The Assumption of Mary: Visions of Creation and New Creation

We kayaked 10 miles into the outback: across Yellowstone’s Lewis Lake, up the Lewis River and halfway across Shoshone Lake to the campsite.

Stepping out, stepping back: there I found the different perspective I was hoping for as we celebrated the Eucharist on the shore, looking way off across the lake. This gaze opened into infinity, finding and awakening vision: the faculty to be able to see and to understand.

I frequently return to the natural world to reawaken this faculty in myself. At the same time, the great feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, August 15, in a similar and complementary way awakens our vision, yet with even greater clarity and depth.

The elder of our group of six, our guide, a wise man who is at once a cowboy, a scientist, and a politician, characterized the vision by order, beauty, and truth. To that I would add love, peace, and grace. In our dense and noisy urbanized world, it is so hard to maintain clear vision. It seems difficult to find stable ground on which to stand, with a frame of reference outside ourselves. So we fall into myopia, unable to see beyond our small screens. Without a guiding vision, we know not who we are nor where we are going. COVID-19 has only confused us more, intensifying the already staggering pandemic of anxiety and depression with which we have been struggling, while suicide rates climb.

We need the sight of a still mountain lake or of an ocean sunrise to awaken the vision of creation that reflects the Transcendent, revealing order, love and beauty. We need to experience that. Yet the power of the natural world, with its apparent destructiveness, at times, can seem ambiguous to us. Does creation care about us? (In the peace, celebrating Mass on the shore of that lake, we had to keep our “bear spray” cans with us in case of an encounter with a grizzly bear.)

“In the sixth month, the Angel Gabriel was sent by God to a virgin…”: we are offered visions of the New Creation that leave no doubt that we are loved!

A superficial hearing of the Genesis Creation Story might easily lead one to blow it off as silly superstition that science contradicts and does not need. Listening attentively, one understands: God, who is Order, Beauty, and Love, creates. He creates Man – the man and the woman together – sharing in His Consciousness and His Freedom. He saw that it was good. It was then we who, through the misuse of freedom, have messed it up. The results and details are complicated, of course. Still, no other explanation surpasses this one. This vision is true!

God’s immediate response to our failure is the promise of the Woman and her Offspring! Our very sin would be the occasion to take the incomplete creation to its fullness by the coming of the New Creation.  

I have long stood in awe of the complementarity of the natural creation and human history. Some tend to make the natural world into an idol, demonizing human intervention into it. Others, isolated in cities, perhaps, idolize human power over nature. Our Christian vision harmonizes and unifies both nature and history!  

In the fullness of time a baby girl is immaculately conceived. A few years later that Woman, then young, receives an invitation via an archangel. She says a pure, free, and unequivocal YES. The Divine Presence comes over her and makes His home in her. Divinity and humanity are united perfectly within her. The Word becomes flesh. A baby is born.  

That God Man, Love Incarnate, fully reveals that indeed God loves you and loves me, and He loves all to the point that even when we tried to extinguish Him, His love conquers death and opens the way to the final step: our very union with Him, what the Church Fathers call the “divinization” of humanity.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband… And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Revelation 21:1-2, 5.

The Woman, Mary, always united with her Offspring, stood as witness, offering her Son to the Father for us at the side of the Cross, where He made her the Mother of the Church. At the end of her journey in this stage of life, she was taken up into the total fullness of life, in body and soul. This is a great and glorious gift for her and for all of us in the Church. It contains a great promise for us and God’s commitment to the fulfillment that we call the coming of the New Creation. It is this that we celebrate now. The Eastern Church likes to call it her Dormition. In the West we like to call it her Assumption. It’s the same thing.

This is the Vision for us all to see. I saw it again, celebrating Mass on the shores of Shoshone Lake, Wyoming, July 23, 2021. Blessed Feast of the Assumption of Mary to all.