HOMILIES PREACHED BY FATHER ALTIER ON THE FEAST OF THE ASSUMPTION

Today, we celebrate the solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is very different from the Ascension of Our Lord: Our Lord ascended, body and soul, into Heaven by His own power. Assumption means "by someone else's power." And so what we celebrate today is that our Lady was "taken" up to Heaven by the power of God, body and soul. She is not the first person to be taken body and soul from this earth; but, next to Our Lord, she is the first one to enter the fullness of Heaven. We read the Book of Genesis and we see that Enoch was taken up to Heaven, body and soul. It says simply: "He walked with God." Then, we see the prophet Elijah being taken up into Heaven in a whirlwind with a fiery chariot. Elijah and Enoch will come again, and they still have to die.

Our Lady, on the other hand, has gone to eternity. She has entered into the fullness of the glory of God and she beholds God face to face, both body and soul, in Heaven. That is the glory that we celebrate today. We can ask ourselves, "Why has God taken her and not everyone else?" Well, on one level, it is the first fulfillment of His promise.

Wednesday August 15, 2001

Feast of the Assumption

Reading I (Revelation 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab)

Reading II (1 Corinthians 15:20-27)

Gospel (St. Luke 1:39-56)

We read, for instance, in the second reading today that the last enemy to be destroyed is death. And so what we are really celebrating today is the victory over death. Now, we could look at the Resurrection of Our Lord on Easter Sunday and His Ascension into Heaven and see the victory over death. We see the devil's head crushed. Yet, it would be easy for us to look at that and say, "But He is God. Of course, He can rise from the dead. Of course, He is going to go back to Heaven - He is God. What about the rest of us? He has made these promises, but how do we know that they are really going to be fulfilled?"

Today we see the promise fulfilled in one like us. Our Blessed Lady is not God. She is a human woman like any human woman who is here today. She is like us in every single way except sin. That is the only difference: We have sinned and she did not. Otherwise, she is a human person; Jesus is a divine Person. Mary, then, taken up to Heaven body and soul so that the fullness of her humanity is there, already shares in the grace of the Resurrection, which all of us will be able to share in on the last day of this world. All our bodies will rise from the dead and be reunited with our souls - either in Heaven or in hell, as the case may be. Our bodies and souls will be reunited for all eternity. Our Lady already shares in that and so she is the firstfruits, she is the first fulfillment of the promises of Our Lord; and she is, for us, the foreshadowing of what it is that will happen to us.

Still, we can ask ourselves about this feast. Why has the Church chosen the readings that She chose? We read from the Book of Revelation about the Ark of the Covenant being seen in the Holy of Holies, in the temple of God. You will recall that the Ark of the Covenant, for the Jewish people, was the most holy object that they possessed. For us as Christians, Jesus is the holiest of all people; however, Our Lady is the holiest of all human persons. Of all humanity, she is the holiest one and we look to her. She is the pinnacle of all God's creation.

We see what God has done in His Holy of Holies in the human-made temple (the temple in Jerusalem). Remember that the Ark of the Covenant was behind the curtain; it was in the Holy of Holies and nobody could see it. The Ark of the Covenant was considered the mercy seat of God; it was where God Himself sat as He had mercy in the judgment against His people. Inside of the Ark of the Covenant, there were three different things: There were the two stone tablets for the Ten Commandments, there was a jar with manna in it, and there was a staff: Aaron's staff that had flowered when it was placed in the meeting tent to show that Aaron alone (and his sons after him) would be the priest for the ancient people of Israel. Those three elements were put into the Ark of the Covenant. They were carried by the priests in the Ark, and the Ark was kept in the Holy of Holies.

We are told in Second Maccabees that the prophet Jeremiah took the Ark of the Covenant and locked it up in a cave on Mount Nebo. It will not be seen again until the day that all the peoples of Israel are gathered once again into one; in other words, on the last day of the world. At the very end, the Ark will be seen again in this world.

The Ark of the Covenant was also taken by the Philistines at one point. It was put into the temple of Dagon. Every morning, the Philistines would come into their temple and the statue of Dagon was lying flat on its face. Finally, they got tired of this because pestilence broke out in Philistia and all these different things happened. So, they finally hitched up some oxen and put the Ark on a wagon and sent it back. The path that the Ark followed as it went back up to Jerusalem is the exact same road that Our Lady would have taken as she went from Nazareth up towards Jerusalem.

But we know, from the Second Book of Samuel and also from First Chronicles, that the Ark started to tip. A young man put out his hand to stop the tipping of the Ark, but it was forbidden for anybody to touch the Ark or they would die immediately. The man touched the Ark and he died. David refused, then, to bring the Ark into the temple because he was afraid of God. And so he put the Ark into the house of a man named Obed-Edom. There it sat for three months. When they saw that God had blessed the house of Obed-Edom, David brought the Ark the rest of the way up to Jerusalem. The house of Obed-Edom was just outside of Jerusalem.

In the Gospel reading, we see Our Lady going with haste up into the hill country. She went to the house of Zechariah, which was in a suburb just outside of Jerusalem, a place called Ein Karem. There she stayed for three months, just like the Ark of the Covenant. She walked the same path that the Ark had taken and inside of Our Blessed Lady, at that time, was: Our Covenant, Jesus Christ; who is our High Priest; and who is the Bread sent from Heaven. So the three elements that were kept within the Ark in the ancient days were now present within Our Blessed Lady. She is the Ark of the New Covenant. And she walked the same path as the Ark of the Old Covenant.

Finally, if we keep reading in Luke's Gospel, we see that the Lord comes to the temple. He takes over the temple. But now, in the Book of Revelation, we see the Ark in the temple of God, the temple Saint Paul talks about: the one not made by human hands, but eternal, made by God in Heaven. And that Ark is kept in Heaven. The Ark is Our Lady, and that is what we see in the first reading: The temple in Heaven was opened - a curtain was opened so the people could see right into the Holy of Holies. Saint John saw the Ark for the first time in over 500 years since a human person had laid eyes upon the Ark of the Covenant. The first question all of the Jewish people would have asked, hearing that the Ark had been seen, is: What does it look like? Saint John went on to explain it: "A woman, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. And she wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth to a Son." The Ark of the Covenant is the Blessed Virgin Mary. She has been taken, body and soul, into Heaven where she glorifies God at every instant for all eternity.

But the wonderful thing is she is also our mother, and she is our queen. As she glorifies God, she prays for each one of us, her children. When we see these readings today, we recognize that death indeed has been destroyed. We each need to enter into death, but we have the promise of our resurrection. We already see the promise being fulfilled in Our Lady and we ask her intercession that one day we will be able to be with her; that like her, we will behold God face to face, in the resurrected glory and the reunification of our body and soul; and that we will be able to be with her and glorify God for all eternity.

Note: Father Altier does not write his homilies in advance, but relies solely upon the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

August 15, 2002

Feast of the Assumption

Reading I (Revelation 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab)

Reading II (1 Corinthians 15:20-27)

Gospel (St. Luke 1:39-56)

Right from the very beginning of humanity there has been a struggle between life and death. From the very first moments of human existence, Satan came down and tempted Adam and Eve, and they fell; they chose death over life. At that moment, death entered into human existence. It was not intended by God that we would die, but God has made our souls immortal. So even though the body will die, the soul will not. But in the Resurrection of Our Lord from the dead, He has destroyed death; and in so doing, He has promised also that there would be life even for the body, that even though the body will die and will be buried, the body will rise also from the dead and the body will be reunited with the soul for all eternity. That is the glory which is ours.

And that is what we celebrate today, that in our own Mother, in one of us, a human person, death has been destroyed. It is destroyed in the Resurrection of Our Lord, and the path to Heaven has been opened in the Ascension of Our Lord, both body and soul into Heaven. But today we celebrate the glorious feast of the one other person - and the one merely human person - who already shares in the fullness of that life. Not only did Our Lady's soul go to Heaven, but her body has gone there as well. She already shares in the fullness of the Resurrection. In the Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven, God has taken her in the fullness of her humanity, body and soul, into the glory of Heaven.

She is the Ark of the Covenant of which we heard in the first reading. Saint John, in the vision he had on the island of Patmos, saw the heavens opened and there the ark of the covenant was seen. And the ark was seen as a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. This is, of course, Our Blessed Lady - the true Ark of the Covenant; the Ark of the New Covenant; the one who carried the covenant, Jesus Christ, within her; the one who was promised from the very first moment after sin, when God promised there would be a woman who would be at enmity with Satan, whose son Satan would nip at his heel, but the woman would crush the head of the devil. That woman is our Mother.

Where our Mother has gone, we hope to follow. She has gone to be with her Son, but she desires for all of her children to be able to be with her, to be able to glorify God. And God desires, not only that we would give Him glory for all eternity, but, as Our Lady prophesied under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that all generations would call her blessed, that we now call her blessed. For all eternity we will be able to glorify God on Our Lady's behalf. The desire of Our Lady for each one of us as her children, and the true intent of Our Lord, is that all of us would be able to share in the glory of Heaven, both body and soul. For all of us, the body will not rise from the dead until the last day of the world, when Our Lord comes in His glory at the Second Coming at the sound of the archangel's trumpet. Then the graves of the dead will be opened and all of the bodies will rise, and they will be reunited with the souls of those individuals, whether in Heaven or in hell, for all eternity.

And so the choice remains with us. Our goal is Heaven. Saint Paul told us in the second reading that Christ has been raised from the dead and we are to set our sights on Heaven. That is exactly what we are called to do, and that is what this feast celebrates. Our Lady, from the first moment of her existence, had her sights set on Heaven. And so singleheartedly was she focused on God that she has been able to enter into the fullness of that life in Heaven now. And now each one of us, though we are not entirely singlehearted in our focus on the Lord because of sin, nonetheless, the challenge of this life is to overcome sin and to be singleheartedly focused on Christ and to have our sights set on Heaven so that at the moment of our death, our souls will be able to enter into Heaven. If perfected, we will be able to bypass Purgatory and enter into the glory of God and await the redemption - not only of our souls, which will have been accomplished - but of our bodies as well, where we too will also experience the Assumption, the assumption of our own bodies and the reunification of our bodies with our souls, where, then, with Our Lady in her glory, both body and soul, we too, in our glory, will behold God face to face and glorify Him for all eternity.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Friday August 15, 2003

Feast of the Assumption

Reading I (Revelation 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab)

Reading II (1 Corinthians 15:20-27)

Gospel (St. Luke 1:39-56)

As we celebrate today the glorious solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we have to recognize the importance of this feast and why we hold it in such honor. We hear in the second reading about Jesus being raised from the dead, and that following from Him will be each person in their proper order. When we think about Our Lord, Saint Paul makes very clear that He is the new Adam, and that just as death came through man so the resurrection of the dead will come through man also. Jesus is the first to rise from the dead, just as the sin that our first parents committed was ultimately the sin of Adam. While both had a part, it was Adam who had the greater sin. So too, because Our Lord is the Redeemer of the world, He is the first to rise from the dead. But because Our Lady had such an intimate part in Our Lord’s life, not only in bearing Him, giving Him birth, and nourishing Him, but in giving her entire life to the service of the redemption, to the service of our Redeemer, she therefore is the firstfruits after Christ.

And so as we celebrate the Resurrection, we must understand that today we celebrate the resurrection of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is the day that she was taken both body and soul into Heaven. Her body already shares in the resurrection from the dead. She has a glorified body, just as ours one day will be, provided that we die in the state of grace and our souls go to Heaven. Our bodies one day will be reunited with our souls, and our bodies along with our souls will live forever. So Our Lady already shares in the resurrection from the dead. This is important to us because as Elizabeth spoke to Mary in the Gospel reading regarding the Incarnation and said, “Blessed are you who believed that the Lord’s words to you would be fulfilled,” so too those words can be spoken of Our Lady today: Blessed is she because she believed that Our Lord’s words to her would be fulfilled, that Our Lord’s words to all of us would be fulfilled, that we would be raised to new life, that we would share in the resurrection from the dead, that we would be glorified forever in Heaven.

We must learn from Our Lady, then, how to do this. She put her entire life at the service of Christ, and that is what we are to do as well. That is going to be our ultimate glory. For too many of us, our entire life is at the service of ourselves. Even when we place our lives at the service of others – for instance, those who are parents and place their lives at the service of their families and of one another as spouses – we must be very careful to make sure that even that is done for the Lord. Our Lady put her life at the service of Saint Joseph and of Jesus, but that is because she recognized it was the Will of God. Everything she did was done out of love for God, and flowing from that, out of love for neighbor. That is precisely what we must do.

Like Our Lady, we too, each one of us, must be an ark of the covenant to bring Jesus Christ into the world. We can do that only if we are united with Christ. Our Lady was so perfectly united with Christ that there was this beautiful exchange that we celebrate today. In the Incarnation, God came down from Heaven to take on our humanity in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary so that she shared as the ark of the covenant both body and soul. It as not merely her soul which glorified God, as we heard in the Gospel reading, but her body as well. Her body itself is the ark of the covenant, which is why for Mary it is not just her soul that has been taken up to Heaven but her body also because it was in her body that she bore the Lord. But now we see that beautiful exchange that as God came down from Heaven to take on our humanity, our humility, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, now He has taken Mary into Heaven to share in His glory, to share in the glory of the divinity. Not that she becomes God, but that she has now been absorbed into the Godhead where she will glorify God forever. That is what the Lord wants to do for each one of us. If we are willing in our hearts to allow Him in and to bring Him into the world as Our Lady did, to become an ark of the covenant, then He will come to each one of us as He does in Holy Communion, as He does in the Indwelling of the Trinity. And if we are willing to allow Him to shine through us, and if we are willing to allow His glory to be seen in us and through us in this world, then He will bring us both body and soul to share in His glory in Heaven, to share in His divinity, and to glorify God forever.

It is this which we celebrate today: that in one who is our own, the Blessed Virgin Mary (who is not a goddess, but who is a human woman just like any other human woman; who is one of us, a human person), the promises of God that we would share in the resurrection have been fulfilled in her, which gives to us not only the confidence but the guarantee that the Lord’s words spoken to us will be fulfilled in each one of us as well: that as the firstfruits we too will rise from the dead. Body and soul will be united once again, and, provided that we die in the state of grace having lived in this world as arks of the covenant of Christ, we will then be able to live forever – body and soul – in the glory of the resurrection.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

August 15, 2004

Feast of the Assumption

Reading I (Revelation 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab)

Reading II (1 Corinthians 15:20-27)

Gospel (St. Luke 1:39-56)

In the first reading today from the Book of Revelation, we hear the words that God’s temple in heaven was opened and in it could be seen the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark of the Covenant was the single most holy piece that the Israelites possessed. It was the mercy seat of God. It was the place where the two tablets of the Ten Commandments were kept. It was placed in the Holy of Holies in the temple, the place where only the high priest could go, and only once per year could he enter there. The Ark had not been seen at the time that Saint John received his revelation for over seven hundred years, from the time that the people of Israel went into exile at the time of the prophet Jeremiah. The prophet, we are told in the Second Book of Maccabees, took the Ark of the Covenant and went up on Mount Nebo. There he placed it in a cave and filled in the cave with stones, and he prophesied that it will not be seen again until God gathers all of His people together. Then the glory cloud will be seen, and, at that point, a revelation will be given to someone to be able to know exactly where to find the ark.

So, knowing that no one had seen the Ark of the Covenant for seven hundred years, now suddenly Saint John has a vision in which he saw the Ark of the Covenant. It was a vision very much like the vision of Moses, who saw the temple in heaven, who saw the worship of God, and he was told that he was to make a copy of everything he had seen. The very first thing that Moses would have noticed in the temple of God, besides God Himself, was the ark. And so when he made the ark, God told him exactly how it was supposed to be made. It was made of acacia wood. It was overlaid with pure gold and had two cherubim on the top. And that was the place in Israel where God was seated, the throne where God Himself dwelt among His people.

Well, several thousand years after Moses had his vision, God sent His ark into the world. In this ark, the New Covenant was placed. In this ark, God found the perfect throne to be enthroned among His people. In this ark, we will find the mercy seat; we will find the place where God Himself has chosen to dwell among His people. And Saint John describes exactly what the ark looks like: A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars, and she is wailing aloud in pain as she labors to give birth. The covenant who was inside of this woman is none other than our Blessed Lord, of Whom the prophet Isaiah tells us in the 42nd and 49th chapter that the Messiah is the Covenant. The Old Covenant was written on stone. The New Covenant is a Person, living, and more importantly, loving. We are drawn into this Covenant, indeed we are baptized into this Covenant, and we become members of Jesus Christ. Therefore, we share in the same glory that Our Lady experienced. We are made members of the Covenant, which means that we, like Our Lord, have the joy of being able to dwell somehow within Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. And, like Our Lady, we have the joy of being able to carry the Covenant within our own selves because every time that we receive Holy Communion we renew that commitment we made to Our Lord on the day we were baptized. We receive the Covenant literally into our own self and we carry Him in a manner similar to the way that Our Lady did.

Today, as we celebrate her glorious Assumption into heaven, we recall that she was taken body and soul – the fullness of her humanity – into the glory of heaven. That is exactly what Saint John saw. He saw that in God’s temple in heaven, there in the Holy of Holies, the place where only the high priest can enter (and Jesus, Saint Paul tells us in his Letter to the Hebrews, is our High Priest Who has entered into the Holy of Holies in heaven; He has opened the way so that Saint John would be able to see this vision), is the ark. The ark is the holiest, most exalted, and most revered creature that God has ever made and that He ever will make. It is in this Holy of Holies that God Himself has chosen to reside even now because Our Blessed Lady’s Immaculate Heart is the single highest and most perfect creation that God has made. In the Old Testament, we know that God was enthroned upon the cherubim because the angels were the highest creatures in heaven. They were the ones who gave Him the most glory, and they were the ones who loved Him the most. But Our Lady is the queen of the angels, and the angels serve her. And because there is now in heaven someone who is even higher than the angels, someone who loves God more than the angels, and someone who gives God more perfect worship than the angels, God is now enthroned within her Immaculate Heart, the most perfect created place in the universe, the highest place in all of the heavens. It is there that God has chosen to dwell.

So when we read, for instance, in the second reading that the Lord is going to destroy death but it is going to be the very last thing destroyed, in the meantime there is a certain order to the way that things have to work. Christ has to be the first fruits of the new creation and everything else will follow in proper order. Because Our Lady is next in line behind Our Lord, she has now been taken body and soul; in her, death has been destroyed. Like Our Lord, of Whom Saint Paul says after He had risen from the dead that death has no more power over Him, the same is completely true of Our Lady. For all of the other saints whose souls are in heaven, their bodies still lie in death. Death still has some power over them, not in the spiritual sense, but in the physical way. On the day of the resurrection, death will be destroyed forever and our bodies will rise and will be reunited with our souls. As we enter into death, we enter physically; but because of our baptism, death has no power over us spiritually as long as we are in the state of grace. Our bodies, of course, give way to the reality of death. But on that last day of the world, on the day that death is destroyed forever, our bodies are going to rise and they will share in the glory of our souls; and, like Our Lady, we too will be assumed both body and soul into heaven.

But right now among humanity, she alone, we are able to say, is there. There are two others who have not died, Enoch and Elijah, but they will be coming back and they will die. So, for them, it is not that they are in the fullness of heaven; they are in a place of glory, but not the fullness of heaven as yet because they have not yet tasted death to be able to enter into life. But Our Lady, perfectly united with Our Lord in all things, has entered through the gates of death that were broken through by her Son, and because of her perfect love, because of her absolute sinlessness, because of the fact that the devil never had any authority over her even for one split-second of her life, so too neither did death have authority over her. That is why her body could rise along with her soul. She already experiences in her body the fullness of the resurrection. And she experiences in the fullness of her person, unlike any of the saints, the fullness of life in heaven because she is experiencing life in the fullness of her humanity both body and soul.

One of the things that oftentimes happens when someone dies is that those who remain think often about the question of whether or not this person is in heaven. They can think about all the good things and the possibilities and why it is probably fitting that the person has gone the right way, but then they can think about some other things and then they doubt and they wonder. What a wonderful thing to know that our Mother is in heaven, and not like anybody else in heaven but in the fullness of her humanity, that she is untouched by death, that she has risen victorious with our Blessed Lord, that she has crushed the head of the devil – and that she is praying for us, that she is right there in the Holy of Holies with our High Priest Who stands before the throne of the Father making intercession for us, and that she is there with Him, and, in fact, that He is there within her praying for us in her Immaculate Heart to the Father to have mercy on us. That is the glory that is ours.

Indeed, Our Lady’s words in her Magnificat that all generations would call her blessed ring true in every single generation for the last 2,000 years. And for all eternity the same glory will be given to her because, of all the human creatures that God has made, there is none more blessed than she. There are none who are more holy, there are none who are more exalted, there are none who deserve the grace and the glory of God more than she, and God has blessed her beyond any other human person. While it would certainly be a glorious thing to be able to believe in this from an arm’s distance, to look at it theoretically and say, “Praise God that one person has done it right!” how much more glorious it is that we can say that this is our Mother who has done this, that she is united with us. She is not someone who is at an arm’s distance. It is not something that we have to look at merely in a theoretical way, but our own Mother, the one who bore us in her Immaculate Heart, is now in heaven assuming the highest place that God has made for any creature and giving Him the greatest glory; in fact, she gives Him more glory in heaven than all the angels and all the saints combined – and she is our Mother – with her heart wide open to us, desiring for us to be able to enter into the glory of heaven with her so we can give God that glory.

We can begin even now. In her life on earth, she gave God glory at every moment. And when she received the greatest gift of the Incarnation of the Word of God in her immaculate womb, she, as the Ark of the Covenant, carried Him and presented Him in the temple, loved Him and nurtured Him. You have the same opportunity. You will receive Jesus Christ into yourself in just a few moments, and within you – in your body, in your soul, in your heart – the glory of God will reside. If you are in the state of grace, the Most Holy Trinity dwells within you 24 hours a day, so heaven has come to you until the day that you can go to heaven. In the meantime, in this world each one of us is called to be a new ark of the covenant, to bring God out into the world, to be able to love Him and worship Him and glorify Him along with our Blessed Lady, to be able to prepare ourselves for the day when what has been fulfilled in Our Lady will also be fulfilled in us: that death will be destroyed, that it will have no more power over us, that on the glorious day of the resurrection we will be able to be in heaven both body and soul, and that in the fullness of our humanity, like Our Lady, we will glorify God for all eternity.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

The Dignity of the Human Body

Monday August 15, 2005

Feast of the Assumption

Reading I (Revelation 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab)

Reading II (1 Corinthians 15:20-27)

Gospel (St. Luke 1:39-56)

In the second reading today, Saint Paul speaks to the Corinthians about death and the reality that death has been overcome in Christ. That is precisely what we celebrate today. We see in our Blessed Mother that in her Immaculate Conception she is free of sin, and that in her Divine Maternity she is without concupiscence, that is, the desires and passions of the flesh, and now in her Assumption she has overcome death. When we look at what happened in the Garden of Eden, it brought sin, it brought concupiscence, and it brought death; and we see in these areas of our Blessed Mother’s life that she has completely overcome everything the devil brought into the world by trapping our first parents into sin. So we have, then, not only death being conquered in a human person, but what we see for ourselves and what is so important to understand – especially for this society – is the dignity of the human body. Our Lady shares already in the Resurrection, and she shares already in the glorification in heaven. The Assumption means that she was taken body and soul by her Son into heaven. She has crushed in this way the head of Satan.

But we too, being members of the Mystical Body of Christ, are to share in the crushing of the head of Satan. He was there trying to devour her Child. Well, since we are members of the Mystical Body, and she who gave birth to the head gave birth to the whole body as well, we are the ones right now that Satan is trying to destroy. Tragically, he is doing a pretty good job of it. All you need to do is look around and you see these people who do not recognize their dignity. They not only do not recognize the dignity of their body; they do not even recognize the dignity of their soul. Consequently, there is no understanding of the dignity of who they are as human persons. So we are running around these days with people putting tattoos all over their bodies, we have people putting pinholes all over their bodies, we have the drugs, we have the alcohol problems, we have all these different things that go on, and the lust, of course, that is completely rampant in our society.

The human body has become an object. It is not longer recognized as an integral part of the person and the expression of the person, but rather it is seen merely as an object. What more would the devil want – because the human body is the only thing in physical creation that can express physically what it means to be an image of God. The dignity that the human body has is quite extraordinary. At the same time, the human body is the weak link in our entire makeup. Saint Francis, remember, called it Brother Donkey because it has its own desires and demands, and if you try to rein them in it is pretty stubborn and screams at you. We know the weaknesses of the flesh, but the point is that we need to strive to overcome those weaknesses. We need to be able to recognize that we can glorify God even now in and through our human body, and it needs to begin with the recognition of the dignity of the body.

All we have to do, again, is listen to what was in the readings. We hear about a woman who is about to give birth. Here is a human woman carrying in her human body a Child Who is God, Who has taken a human body to Himself (a whole human nature, for that matter), and He is about to be given birth. And it was with that human body that He saved humanity, by suffering and going to the Cross.

The human body is not something that can be rejected, it is not something evil, it is not something worthless, but it must be recognized as an integral part of the person. Our body, Brother Donkey sitting right here in this pew, is going to share in the glory of God – provided, of course, that we are in the state of grace when we die. If our bodies are going to be able to go to heaven, if they are going to be raised from the dead to share in the glory of eternity, then why would we think that somehow they are just objects now? It means, obviously, that not only do we have to present ourselves in a modest manner, but we cannot be looking at others in an immodest or impure way and we cannot be destroying our bodies by doing things that are foolish and sinful to them.

We need to make sure we are upholding the dignity of the human body because today Our Lady’s human body along with her soul was taken to heaven. That is the feast we celebrate. She is a merely human person. Jesus is God. Mary is one of us entirely; she is not God at all. Therefore, in a merely human person death has been overcome and in a merely human person the glory of eternity has been revealed. Our Lady is the foreshadowing of what we are called to. Being our mother, she is going to lead us by the hand to show us the way, and so she is. She shows us not only the way to heaven, but she shows us what it means to have the dignity of the children of God and what the dignity of the human person is really all about. So we look at this feast and then we look at our society and the degradation of humanity and especially of the human body and we see complete contraries: Our Lady’s glorification in heaven and our society’s degradation of the human body on earth. We need to recognize the true dignity God has given to us and live according to that dignity so that we will be prepared both body and soul to share in that glory for eternity.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

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