The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is, by far, one of the most glorious events in Church history. It has defined generations of faith and reverence to the grace of the Almighty God. Through her singular grace of Immaculate Conception, the Lord did not allow the earth to corrupt her most sanctified body but, instead, took her physical and spiritual self into Heaven. More than just being a vessel of salvation, the Blessed Virgin is highly dignified of the singular salvation that only a few of the holy men have received throughout the history of the world.
However, even when the grace received by the Blessed Virgin is most singular, there is an underlying promise of salvation that is deemed to all who obey and had consecrated themselves to God. Like Mary’s fiat that is more than catalyzing the salvation of the world, our affirmation of the will of God grants us to receive the same dignifying grace. While our bodies aren’t most pure like that of Mary, we can still enjoy the beauty of total obedience to God’s will and, in turn, receive our reward of being with Him at the end of our earthly journey.
But what is this promise of salvation that we can all receive when we follow the Blessed Virgin’s path to holiness? While we are not deserving of the glorious assumption that the Mother of our Lord has enjoyed, we deserve to follow Mary’s example of virtue, obedience, and patience in her suffering alongside our Lord Jesus Christ. It doesn’t sound like a promise but, as what the Blessed Virgin had promised Saint Bernadette in Lourdes, we are only promised happiness in the next life and not in this one.
It is harder nowadays to believe that happiness is incongruent to our path to holiness. Especially when popular media promotes more of the earthly happiness, which they say we all deserve regardless of the consequences, we aren’t truly entitled to one. Our earthly happiness is a mere temporality that we cannot also bring to our graves. While we are all called to live life to the fullest possibilities, we are called as Christians to be more of an example to the Christian life.
This Christian life doesn’t constitute earthly happiness for, like the Lord who has no pillow to lay his head on (cf. Luke 9:58b), living a Christ-like life doesn’t promise any form of relief other than the mere thought of being adjoined to His mission on earth.
In a similar sense, the Blessed Mother fully understood that she cannot cease to exist in suffering. Rather, she took it as her path of happiness and the beholding of a salvific promise that the Lord has endowed her because of her relentless faith. The promise of eternal happiness is what signifies the Assumption of Our Lady to Heaven. Like her, we can behold a promise of eternal happiness that we all had beheld at the moment of our Baptism and throughout every second of our Christian lives. We all are recipients of that salvific promise. We all are bound to see our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier at the end of it all. While we cannot be bestowed the similar redemption that Our Lady has partaken as the Mother of God, we are bestowed the promise of living out our earthly lives as a preparation for the eternal happiness where we can truly live our triumphant Christian lives as we behold the magnificence of God and become more active in our Christian life through our eternal participation in the sacrifice of the Holy Mother Church, which is Christ’s true vessel of salvation that is perpetually protected by the glorious lady who was taken up into Heaven, body and soul, to continuously intercede for us.
Listen to this reflection on our Tambayan sa Seminaryo Podcast Network
Tambayan sa Seminaryo 