Mary's Assumption and the dignity of our bodies

Homily: Solemnity of the Assumption (Day) – Cycle C

          Recently, I read an article by Dr. John Grondelski in which he speaks about how the reality of Mary’s Assumption, body and soul, into heaven has much to teach us today, particularly when it comes to the attitude with which we treat our bodies.  I thought that he was spot on and so I want to try to summarize this here for you today as we celebrate this great mystery of our faith.

          As with the Ascension of our Lord, in his glorified human body, into heaven, the Assumption of Mary presents us with a bit of a faith dilemma: How can our human bodies, which are profoundly affected by time and finitude, exist in eternity? and what does it mean that, ultimately, we will exist bodily (not just spiritually) in eternity?  This is not an easy question to answer in our modern culture, as we seem to be in a period where, in regards to the body, les extremes se touchent (“the extremes meet”).

          On the one hand, we have a culture that seems to idolize the body and physical appearances.  Instagram alone has both caused a need for and given rise to a “positive body image” movement: the result of a culture that makes physical appearance and bodily satisfaction of paramount value.

          At the same time, our culture promotes the idolization of the “I”, and that the “I”, that is the wholeness of the person, is reduced to consciousness and thought.  In this extreme, a person’s body is nothing but a tool that he/she uses to interact with the world, but which has no direct impact on who he/she is as a person.  Biological sex is meaningless.  How one identifies in one’s consciousness is paramount.  The body, therefore, is useful, at best, and expendable, at worst.

          So the body is everything and the body is nothing, says a profoundly conflicted modern culture.  How blessed are we, then, to have a faith that can help resolve this conflict by stepping back from the extremes to show us the true value of the human body.  Most recently, it was Pope Saint John Paul II who strove to show the genuine value of the human body as related to the person in his catechesis, the Theology of the Body.

          As did many theologians before him, he recognized that, in becoming incarnate, God invincibly assured us that the bodies he created for us are good and essential to who we are as persons.  In taking that human body, in glorified form, into heaven in his Ascension, he further demonstrated the value of the body as the means through which we will enter into communion with him.  In Mary’s Assumption, body and soul, into heaven, Saint John Paul II saw the fulfillment of God’s promise to return and to bring his holy ones home to himself.  Thus, he could teach that the body—in the form that it is given to us, male and female—is both good and essential to who we are as creatures, created in the imago Dei, the image of God.

          Today, as we honor Mary as the first of Christ’s disciples to experience the full restoration promised to us when our first parents were expelled from Eden, let us not hesitate to speak of the dignity of the human body as the means by which we will experience communion with God in eternity.  And let us give thanks, here in this Eucharist, that we can experience that communion even now: offered to us through Christ’s Body and Blood that is made present to us—really and truly present—here on this altar.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – August 15^th, 2019