“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

 

I submitted to my Lay Carmelite Chapter's newsletter a reflection on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and wanted to share it here.

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” (Luke 1:46)

August 15 is the day that Catholics have long celebrated what is called the Dormition (falling asleep) or Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The Feast of the Assumption celebrates both the happy departure of Mary from this life by her natural death, and her assumption bodily into heaven.

Venerable Pope Pius XII confirmed this belief about the Virgin Mary as the perennial teaching of the Church when he defined it formally as a dogma of Catholic faith in 1950, invoking papal infallibility to proclaim, “that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” As a result of this dogma, as Catholics, we are expected to believe and to accept this teaching of the Church.

Most people outside of the Church assume that we, as Catholics adore and worship Mary as God. We don’t worship her, because worship is only reserved for God. But we do venerate Mary as Mother of God. The nature of Jesus is “true God and true Man.” Mary is not only the mother of the human part of Jesus, but of him entirely. Thus the title of “Mother of God.”

As we look at the Gospel from Luke, chapter one we hear of Mary saying “yes” in becoming the Mother of the Savior. Then, when she finds out her elderly cousin, Elizabeth, was pregnant with John the Baptist, she rushed to help her cousin during her time of need.

We, as Lay Carmelites, are called to imitate Mary in every way. Mary said yes to what God was asking her to do: to be the mother of the Lord. What is God calling us to do to bring Christ into the world?

All of us are called to serve God in different ways. Not as spectacular as Mary, but we are, like Mary, to be “Christ-bearers” when we go into the world. First, at Mass we receive our Lord: body, blood, soul and divinity, in the Eucharist. Then, we are to leave Church, carrying Christ into the world, to serve those in our lives in the same way that Mary served Elizabeth. It’s in the simple ways that we bring Christ into the world, whether it’s loving and taking care of our family, or by showing love and respect towards those we may work with or encounter in our day-to-day existence. We are to show the love of Christ to all we meet.

As we go on with our lives each day, let us, like Mary say, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”