Her Assumption is the prefiguration of what will happen to me if I gain heaven.
What is this? Is the world dead or dying? See, the streets, the lanes, the roads, the highways are thronged with hearses and coffins and mourners. It seems that there before my eyes are all the ways of burying the dead that man has known since the beginning of time.
Yet strange, the mourners are not mourning. Their faces are upturned to the skies. And there, where each gaze meets, she sits upon a throne, the Mother of God and men.
Though no one saw her go to sleep, nor saw her being taken up into heaven, still she is there, touchable to the fingers of faith. The glorified body of Our Lady is a sign and symbol of what we hope for.
Her Assumption is the prefiguration of what will happen to me if I gain heaven.
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The Coronation
We are not alone. Our days are not gray, drab, useless. We have a woman of flesh and blood, a queen who was a creature just like us. Now is the moment to bend into the dust of our spiritual road and to lift the rosary of our whole lives, day by day, into her queenly hands. It will be safe there, as safe as we ourselves will be, if we are her own.
She will transform our days with her love and care and, in turn, give them to God. Then we shall see God, and be one with him.
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Let us therefore turn to her continually, but especially when we are weary, bewildered in the face of the ever-mounting tasks of our life, or when these same tasks lead us on the paths of loneliness, worry and darkness.
Then will the Queen of apostles take us in her arms as mothers do, and … give us some of her faith, courage, perseverance, fortitude, charity, humility, and trust in God to face the work of our life courageously and to lead souls to Christ through her.
Excerpted from Journey Inward, 1984 Alba House, New York, out of print, and Bogoroditza, 2001, available from Madonna House Publications.
[image: Coronation of Our Lady (detail) by ©Patrick Stewart, Madonna House.]
