Today is a great day for Japan. It is the Feast of the Assumption of our Lady; it is the O-Bon Festival; it marks the end of the Second World War; it is also the day that St. Francis Xavier landed in Japan (Kagoshima) in 1549.

The Feast of the Assumption: what does it mean?

The Virgin Mary having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory,” proclaimed Pope Pius XII in 1950. The Assumption completes God’s work in Mary. Since she was to become the mother of God’s Son, she was the ideal human being, the way God wanted human beings to be, namely without sin. So Mary was preserved from sin at the instance of conception. We call that the “Immaculate Conception.”

How do we know all of this? Now here it gets interesting. Everything that is said about our Lady, is really a statement about the Church, and that means US! How is the Church born? Through the Sacrament of Baptism. In baptism we are cleansed from all sins, even from original sin. If Mary is the same as the Church, we talk about the “Immaculate Conception.”

The same holds true for today’s feast of the Assumption. The Church, like Mary, walks through the centuries, over many mountains and obstacles, to help and serve our brothers and sisters, like Mary, who walked into the hill country to help her cousin Elizabeth.

The feast of the Assumption is not a story about space travel, but a very earthly feast. It concerns us on our way through life, a life full of mountains to climb and obstacles to overcome.

But we know that out life’s journey has a goal, and this goal is the ultimate reunion with God in His heavenly glory.
This feast concerns us. It is not only the story about a Jewish woman 2000 years ago called Mary. It concerns every believer, because the central point of our faith is the Resurrection of Christ. And when we say that God completed his work of salvation in Mary by taking her up into heaven, what we are saying is that we, too, the Church, will partake in this salvation; that one day when our earthly journey comes to an end, we will be taken up into the glory of God, into Heaven.

Does that mean that the Christian Faith is a consolation religion, a religion that says, “Never mind the troubles of this world, everything will be fine once we are in heaven?” On the contrary: Ours is a religion of Encouragement and Hope. Because we have faith, we feel encouraged to engage ourselves in this world, to help our neighbor and to make this world a better place to live in for all.

Some people stumble over the expression that Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven.

Well, God loves the whole human being, body and soul, and God redeems the whole human being, not only a part of it, for example the soul. Our body is important for God, who wants to bring it to fulfillment. The great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung called the feast of the Assumption one of the greatest and most important feasts in the calendar. He says that we should not interpret this feast in a historical systematic way, but rather in a psychological way. It expresses humankind’s fundamental longing for the overcoming of all opposites, man –woman, God-man, earth-heaven, time-eternity and so on.

To sum it up: The Feast of Assumption means that we, who trod the hilly and steep path of our daily life, received the promise of Assumption. By contemplating the Assumption of Our Lady, we understand that we, too, are taken up and accepted by God the way we are, with our individual life stories, with the successes we had, and the failures we had, with our hopes and our longings, with our frustrations and our pains. Everything is taken up by God, accepted by God. Nothing is in vain. We are not worthless. We are not anonymous. We have a NAME. And that name is written on the palm of God’s outstretched welcoming hand.