God’s Love for the Body
One of my favourite Churches in Jerusalem is the Abbey of the Dormition. This Catholic Abbey, belonging to the German Benediction order, is on Mount Zion, just outside the walls of the Old City, near the Zion Gate.
The Abbey is said to mark the spot where Mary died or at least ended her worldly existence. Both in Orthodoxy and Catholicism, as in the language of scripture, death is often called a “sleeping” – or “falling asleep” – and this gave the original monastery its name.
The church itself is called the Basilica of the Assumption (or Dormition). As you walk down into the crypt of the church there is a wonderful image of Our Lady in the centre, lying asleep.
Ronald Knox wrote:
“When our Lord took his blessed Mother, soul and body, into heaven, he did honour to the poor clay of which our human bodies are fashioned. It was the first step towards reconciling all things in heaven and earth to his eternal Father, towards making all things new. “The whole of nature,” Saint Paul tells us, “groans in a common travail all the while. And not only do we see that, but we ourselves do the same; we ourselves, although we have already begun to reap our spiritual harvest, groan in our hearts, waiting for that adoption which is the ransoming of our bodies from their slavery.”
What happened to Mary will happen to us. The preface for this feast says:
For today the Virgin Mother of God
was assumed into heaven
as the beginning and image
of your Church’s coming to perfection
and a sign of sure hope and comfort to your pilgrim people;
rightly you would not allow her
to see the corruption of the tomb
since from her own body she marvellously brought forth
your incarnate Son, the Author of all life.
This is an important feast for us to celebrate. It reminds us that our body is an integral part of who we are. It is a sign of God’s love for the body, for human flesh. At a funeral, we bless the coffin with holy water and incense the body recognising it as a temple of the Holy Spirit. All human flesh is sacred to God.
In our age, contempt seems to be shown for the human body. Look at the violence towards people, in war, in ethnic and religious conflict, in the easy access to pornography, in abortion and the neglect of the elderly. Let us see the Assumption as a prophetic sign summing us to respect human flesh, encouraging us to bring about peace, justice and reverence for everything that touches human life.
