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J.M.J August 15, 2012 The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Dear Family of Mary! "Dear children! Today I invite you to accept with seriousness and to live the messages which I am giving you. I am with you and I desire, dear children, that each one of you be ever closer to my heart. Therefore, little children, pray and seek the will of God in your everyday life. I desire that each one of you discover the way of holiness and grow in it until eternity. I will pray for you and intercede for you before God that you understand the greatness of this gift which God is giving me that I can be with you. Thank you for having responded to my call." (April 25, 1990) On this great feast, when our Mother was assumed into heaven, body and soul, we can only marvel that she is with us in such a special way in Medjugorje, and that she calls us to come ever closer to her heart. She has been given to us as a gift, to help us on our way to eternity. In these days we need her help! In honor of the Assumption, I want to share a beautiful reflection from Caryll Houselander's book, Reed of God. The reality of the Assumption is hard to grasp, but Caryll has a way of explaining things that is both down to earth and heavenly!!
They say that when her time came to die, Our Lady was borne up to heaven in the hands of angels, borne through a blue sky that was warm with noonday heat and yet was pale beside the blueness of her mantle. The legions of saints waited her coming, glorious in garments scarlet and white, with burning haloes; and before them all came Gabriel, his mantle dazzling silver in the sunlight. Bowing low, he gave her a lily for a scepter. She passed the multitude of the angels and saints and came at last to a place of solitude; and here her Son came to her, and He was a king in a robe of rose, and His wounds were jewels that shone; and He crowned her with a great crown set with seven brilliant stars for her life's seven sorrows. What does this all really mean? Because we cannot conceive of heaven we have, in our own minds, almost whittled it away to nothingness. Because it is not a place as we understand place, we unconsciously think of it as nowhereness. In our dread of forming a materialist conception of it, we have conceived of it as nothing. We do not know where or what or how heaven is, but this we know, and it is very nearly all that we know about heaven. In heaven Our Lady is with God. Our Lady's body is there, and the Body of Christ is there: and Our Lady's soul and the soul of Christ and His divinity. We can realize this only insofar as we realize it through its effect upon the world. There, before God, is humanity, our humanity; but innocent humanity in all its primal loveliness; humanity with which the Spirit of God is in love. And she is ours! (Caryll Houselander. Reed of God. p. 185) She is ours! Our Lady is our Mother, our sister, our Advocate with the Father, one of us! And she now lives in that heaven we cannot picture or imagine. She lives with Jesus in eternity, both of them in their humanity, Jesus in His Divinity as well. This is what we believe. The visionaries in Medjugorje say they have seen Our Lady in this glorified state, some of them every day for the last 31 years. They have seen her, talked to hear, listened to her, prayed with her, and even embraced her. What can they say about what they have seen? Ivan has said there are no words to describe the beauty of Our Lady or the intensity of the encounter. In Vienna last November he said: Believe me it is not easy, definitely not easy to be with the Gospa every day, to be with her and talk to her every day, to see the light of paradise and be with her every day. After having seen paradise with her and to go back into the normal world is very tough. If you would see the Gospa for just one second I don't know if life in this world would still be interesting. So big is her love. So beautiful is this Mother. Ivan often comments that it is very hard for him to come back to "earth" after he has encountered Our Lady, come down from heaven. He says the experience is indescribable. He has no words. He only has the intense desire to be with Mother Mary, which grows more intense as the years progress. He has glimpsed heaven, through the window Our Lady opens when she comes, and he wants to be home with her. For me this is the center of the mystery of the Assumption. Our Mother has gone home, and we all want to go with her. We want to go home. And so she comes to draw us ever closer to our true home, through our prayer and repentance. Today, may we experience a little of that heaven, that home prepared for us that we can't seem to imagine. Through the exaltation of our Mother, assumed into heaven may we begin to comprehend our future as well, our future in heaven with God. In Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Cathy Nolan ©Mary TV 2012 | 
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