don't be so sure
August 15: dormition, falling asleep, feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, bodily into heaven. A Major Feast in the Episcopal Church, the Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin, Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ:
Saint Mary the Virgin August 15
O God, you have taken to yourself the blessed Virgin Mary, mother of your incarnate Son: Grant that we, who have been redeemed by his blood, may share with her the glory of your eternal kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Although ours doesn't consider Assumption.
Not on my mind until reading Dan Burke's spirituality email yesterday, and then what came up was a conversation sixty-three years ago this summer, probably August 1957, with the three Roman Catholics who were my barracks roommates in C4, Charlie Company, Section 4 at Officer Candidate School, Newport, Rhode Island, as I began my first life adventure after college graduation.
It wasn't my first time in New England, that'd been summer fourteen years earlier during World War II, when my mother and I travelled by train from Pensacola via WashingtonDC to New London, Connecticut to visit my father at a US Maritime Service OCS, Fort Trumbull. But Navy and Newport was new and exciting, and I was on my own for sure, even more so than the sense of Free At Last that September 1953 Sunday afternoon in Gainesville, a freshman at UF and looking at my eighteenth birthday. This was new altogether, hosting a feeling that I'd never had before and, eventually becoming accustomed to Life After School, have never had again. Well, my first week at Gettysburg theological seminary at age 45.
Why have I wandered so far from Assumption? Because it's my nature to wander off track. I'm okay with it, take me or leave me.
That day in the four-person dormitory room of our barracks, we were talking religion, Roman Catholicism from their viewpoint. Dressed in my white sailor suit as an Officer Candidate Seaman Apprentice and clothed in my armor of naiveté, I challenged their RC dogmas of the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception, asking "How could you believe such things?" Their unified response was "The Pope said it and it's okay with me. I don't have to gaze piously up at the sky and say 'I BELIEVE that', it's church dogma and I don't worry about it."
Also, I found out then, and confirmed as recently as this morning, that, although Munificentissimus Deus (above link) is quite clear that she died first, among Roman Catholics, there are differences in understanding and believing whether Mary was taken bodily to heaven alive and never dying, or Mary's body after death was taken to heaven where she was restored to life.
The art above (and below) "Death of the Virgin" about 1600 to1606 or so, by Caravaggio, seems to take the latter view.
The art below El Greco, 1565-1566, Dormition of the Virgin, seems to also? Most with saints gathered 'round her bier. Som artists have angels hovering, ready to take her up, and IDK, but apparently none of them Ascension scenarios.
In fact, the Pope's proclamation seems to be that Mary died, went direct to heaven, and her sacred, virginal body was assumed physically into heaven, where it is eternally preserved in honor.
To me, August 15 doesn't mean Assumption, and, honestly I've hardly thought about it since. Until reading Dan Burke's email yesterday:
https://spiritualdirection.com/2019/08/14/marys-assumption-into-heaven
Read it, you may or may not appreciate it.
What it says to me as a "seek the truther" is that we believe whatever we want to believe, whatever we choose to believe, whatever we grow up in and into, whatever we are taught when we are too young or naive, or it never occurs to us, to think for ourselves instead of letting others, most notably old men of the flat earth age, decide what we must believe. It has often occurred to me since that August 1957 conversation in Newport, RI, that my RC roommates and fellow officer candidates could well have pointed out to me that as a professed lifelong Christian I believed some of the same things they believed, the Doctrine of the Virgin Birth, for example, without stopping to examine it; so there is no essential difference between us.
It remains a fact that occurred to me twice every Sunday morning in my life (eight o'clock and ten-thirty services) of the pre-covid19 world, when I obeyed the rubric
On Sundays and other Major Feasts there follows, all standing
The Nicene Creed
It is a fact of life in religion, that we bond with its tenets to the point that most of us fail ever (and it is indeed a failing) to think, and realize that its tenets are beliefs, that we are wrapped up in Faith not Knowledge. Just so the Creed itself: We believe, not We know. Indeed, this lack of self-awareness is the problem that religion has brought to humanity ever since humanity conceived of religion in contemplating the mysteries of nature and of life itself: the Certainty that is the greatest Sin, and that brings us to horrific cruelties and bloody wars with those who are different from us.
If only we realized that we have faith not knowledge, and that others have their own reasons and causes for their religion, their faith, believing what they do, just as we do; and there are many Ways, innumerable paths to whatever may be at the End, and possibly the Thereafter. So, we Believe, but we don't Know. It's the Certainty that does it to us, our certitude that destroys us, that leads us to destroy each other.
I think, like those OCS brothers of yore, that sometimes it is well, instead of feeling that one must either reject or fervently to believe, simply to accept or let be without worrying about and agonizing over. As I've come to do the Nicene Creed on Sunday mornings.
Certainty: at this point in life, I finally and thankfully have little or none.
RSF&PTL
T+
Black Lives Matter
https://spiritualdirection.com/2019/08/14/marys-assumption-into-heaven