Lifted UP

There is something profoundly human about the Feast of the Assumption. It is a moment that does not draw us away from our humanity, even though at first glance it may seem otherworldly as Mary is taken body and soul into heaven (a concept that challenges the finite human cognition), rather it plunges us into the depths of the gift of life.

Mary is not assumed because she was an angel, flawless and untouched by the struggles of ordinary life. She was a woman of her people: cooking, cleaning, grieving, laughing, enduring whispers of gossip and carrying in her body the daily weariness of work and motherhood. She lived in obscurity, in the small and often unseen corners of Galilee. And yet, it is this woman, the one who said yes in an unremarkable town, whom the Church proclaims is lifted fully into God’s eternal embrace.

For those of us who carry loss, fatigue, or longing, the Assumption offers hope. It reminds us that no part of our lives is wasted in God’s eyes. The ordinary and hidden choices, the yes whispered quietly in faith, the grief we shoulder with love. These are gathered up, honoured, and ultimately transformed.

Mary’s Assumption tells us something more radical still: heaven is not far away. It is not a remote reward at the end of life, but a reality already pressing in on us, already present wherever love takes hold. When Mary is lifted into heaven she becomes for us a signpost, a declaration that our humanity is not destined for decay but for glory.

The Assumption is not only about Mary’s glory. In a way it is also about ours. Mary’s life is a promise of what God intends for all creation: redemption that does not abandon the body but transfigures it. In a culture that often separates the spiritual from the material, the Assumption insists that what we do with our bodies – our gestures of tenderness, the meals we share, the injustices we confront, the hands we extend – matters to God. Our salvation is not an escape from the physical, but a fulfilment of it.

So perhaps today we might ask: what in my own life longs to be lifted up? What might God be drawing into the light, promising not to erase but to transfigure? Like Mary, may we find the courage to say yes to that promise.