Life is a precious gift on lease to us by God which owns but the briefest presence among the living. Neither its beginning nor its ending is within our power to determine or control. It is the living of it that lingers beyond its ending, which brings long forgotten memories to the fore. We can but hope that all which will be remembered of us will bring full measure of a life well-lived for above all else we wish to be remembered well.
In the first reading we heard the Lord say to Samuel “Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature, because I have rejected him. Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the LORD looks into the heart.”[1] What we see, what we believe we see, is often absent from the truth.
There is an expression, commonly known as the Chinese curse, which states “May you live in interesting times.” And it would appear as though we have been so cursed, for by almost any measure, we are most certainly living in interesting times. Within our communities, our nation, and throughout the world, ideological differences are sharply dividing us, alienating neighbor from neighbor and increasingly calling for the destruction of any and all those who are deemed ideologically impure or deficient.
There is a strange irony in how we choose to live our lives these days. We carry smart phones and a myriad of wireless devices everywhere we go so that we can stay in touch or be touched at any moment of any day by virtually anyone, and yet … we say our privacy is very important to us and we expend copious amounts of energy in all manner of machinations to keep from letting anyone know anything at all about us. It is strange irony indeed.
From the beginning, when God first breathed life into man, two existential questions have been asked to which no satisfactory or acceptable answer has of yet been forthcoming. Each of us at some time in our life has asked or been asked these questions, “Who am I?” and “Who are you?” and I would readily wager everything I have that you have never formulated or received an answer that caused you to state emphatically and with great enthusiasm, “That’s it … exactly!”
The “souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction. But they are in peace.”[1] This passage from the Book of Wisdom notes that to the foolish the dead have been afflicted with their own mortality and have simply ceased to be, that there is nothing left of their essential being, nothing more beyond the still and silent dust that fills the spot where what remains of once a living human being has now been laid to rest.
Growing up I can vividly recall eating meals together as a family. Each meal was begun with a blessing and thanksgiving to Almighty God for what we were about to receive. Conversation was lively, often boisterous, and even on occasion might result in heated argument. There was never any reluctance or hesitation when it came to finding a seat at the table because there was always so much love and joy that surrounded it. The food that we ate could never be classified as Haute Cuisine but it was nourishing and plentiful; we never left the table hungry, either physically or spiritually.
Each year around this date we come together to celebrate the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who we call the Theotokos which is Greek for God Bearer, the Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Mother of God. On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII declared, “that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory,” as a dogma of the Church. But Christians have professed this since apostolic times. It is in fact the oldest feast day of our Lady. Numerous accounts of the life of Mary after the Ascension of our Lord describe her assumption.
This weekend, even as we celebrate and commemorate the anniversary of the American experience in the cause of freedom and liberty, we find ourselves floundering as a nation, confounded and confused by who and what we are as a people, and bewildered by ever expanding societal divisions and cultural differences. We find ourselves no longer a melting pot, no longer living as “One Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” but rather a divided and polarized people who no longer remember why freedom and liberty are matters of great and serious import.
