ASUNCIΌN
On
15 August 1537 a Spanish explorer came on a bend of the Paraguay River that
appealed to him as suitable for a settlement. It was the feast of the
Assumption of Mary and he called the place Asunciόn. The town that grew there became the “Mother of the Cities” of South
America. Today it is the capital of a small country but for three centuries it
was the centre of Spanish colonial expansion and control. Like Sao Paolo and
San Francisco, the religious name of a great city does little to mask its
earthy character.
For that Spanish
captain it was a devout moment when he called down a name that carried enormous
weight in Christian tradition. From early times, when they reflected on who
Jesus of Nazareth really was, people had looked at his mother in wonder.
“Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that suckled you!” And by
the fifth century Christians felt comfortable enough to actually call Mary, ‘Mother
of God’. All sorts of thoughts flowed from this and a key one was, being so
close to her Son in every way, Mary must have shared not only in his anguish
and suffering but in his joy and victory. Just as the Lord rose from the dead
and returned to the Father so his Mother was raised up (assumed) to heaven with
him.
And just as the name Asunciόn is a mixture of earth and
heaven, so too is every woman and man. But this day of Mary is perhaps
specially a celebration of women. The secular world likes to remember Mothers’
Day as a gesture towards thanking our mothers, wives and women generally for
their love and care. Recently I have been aware of several cases of women
attending to their sick incapacitated husbands, day in day out, without a word
of “poor me, what kind of life is this?” They have lost their freedom and have
zero social life,. Yet they freely give up everything to attend to their
spouse.
Such people come to
realise the truth of Jesus words, “those who lose their life find it.’ They
come to sense that their experience – though you would never wish it on anyone
– is, in the end, precious. They touch here an extraordinary truth which the
dominant culture of our time fudges: to give one’s life, to accept continuous
hardship, to accept that options are closing all round me – these things do not
have to be disasters. They can be life-giving. “When you were young you went where you liked;
now that you are old someone else will tell you where to go” (John 21:18).
Mary understood these
things. In the grubby world of a remote province of a first century Roman
colony, she saw her son driven to execution by the obduracy of his
contemporaries. His Ascension and her Assumption are the descriptions we have
for their triumph over the muddled reality we call this world, which is our
home,
15 August 2015 The Assumption of Mary
Revelations 11:19, 12:1-10 1
Corinthians 15:20-26 Luke
1:39-56
No comments:
Post a Comment