“I tell you the truth,” says Jesus to the disciples in John, in the chapter just prior to his famous “High Priestly prayer”: “it is good for you that I should go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (Jn 16:7). The efficacy of the martyrs after their deaths was a commonplace in some streams of ancient Judaism and Christianity; it is more familiar to us in science fiction and fantasy, where heroic sacrifice leads to the apotheosis that alone can truly enable the defeat of evil. “Strike me down, and I shall become more powerful…” and all of that.
It is of interest to compare lectionaries on this Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God. In the Latin Church, the readings seem to be logically keyed to the person of Mary herself: first, the revelation of God’s ark in heaven and the woman clothed with the sun (Rev 11:19-12:10); then, Psalm 45, with its differentiation of the king’s bride and the Queen Mother, “arrayed in gold”; then, 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, with its glorious description of the progressive resurrection of all humanity, “each in their own order”; and then, finally, Luke’s infancy narrative, specifically the scene of the Visitation and the delivery of the Magnificat (Lk 1:39-56). The point would appear to be that on this Feast, it has indeed been the case that God has “scattered the proud in the conceit of their hearts, cast down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted the lowly”—particularly, by the assumption into heaven not of some great patriarch, prophet, or other hero of ancient Israel, not some avatar or demigod or obvious bodhisattva, but of a Jewish peasant woman, a mother whose only son was, in the eyes of the world at least, executed as a criminal of the state. She goes to heaven, which, to be clear, is always a form of cosmic promotion and accession to rule: it is not what we think of it, as a kind of cosmic Disney World (though that sounds fun for other reasons, I’m sure). Heaven comes with responsibilities, duties, officia, and ongoing education we cannot now imagine (unless, of course, we are Origen of Alexandria, who did exactly that in the most influential form in De Principiis II.11). And now, the second entity in all of creation to enjoy not just some measure of such power, but plenipotentiary, absolute power over creation? A bereaved mother, essentially a non-person in the eyes of wealthy well-to-dos, aristocratic priestly elites, and Roman occupiers alike.
The Eastern lectionary focuses more explicitly on Christ. Philippians 2:5-11 is the Apostle reading, Paul’s Christ-hymn of Jesus’ hyperexaltation and theonymy to receive the Divine Name, YHWH or Kyrios, and the submission of all creation at the eschaton, to the glory of God the Father. And then, more curiously, the Gospel reading from Luke 10:38-42 and 11:27-28. The first one deals with a Mary, but not the Mary we have in mind: punning on the commonality of names, the Gospel for the Feast seems to want to suggest that the virtue of the one can be used to understand the glory of the other. This is the famous passage where Martha is a hard-working busybody, and Mary (of Bethany) is a freeloading intellectual, though of course we are meant to take away that the former is too anxious about life in the world and the latter has elected the right course of action, to humbly sit at Jesus’ feet and receive his teaching. Likewise, so we should suppose, Blessed Mary (Mother of Jesus) was the ideal disciple of Jesus, and a contemplative rather than an active type, consumed with the yoga of jnana rather than of karma. This is not wrong, even if it is not quite the Mary we’re after here: Luke does, after all, depict Mary as just such a contemplative, “treasuring all these things” concerning Jesus as he grew up and “pondering them in her heart” (Lk 2:19). And then, later, Jesus’ somewhat infamous Marian rebuke: when a woman in the audience blesses “the womb that bore [him] and the breasts that gave [him] suck!”, he replies, somewhat coyly, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” (11:27-28). But the lectionary spins the scene positively: the Blessed Virgin is both, and especially the latter.
None of these texts, of course, quite mention the narrative of the Dormition: Mary’s falling asleep in Christ, the assumption of her soul, the resurrection and ascension of her body. These are, after all, later stories in the history of Early Christianity and their historicity, no matter how often dogmatized, is troubled (not least by the fact that the earliest Transitus Mariae texts do not speak with one mind on what exactly became of Mary, and they do so several centuries after the fact). This does not make it irrational to believe in Mary’s glorification, but it certainly makes the grounds and character of faith in her Dormition different from, say, the major elements of the Creed. Perhaps then the ultimate Eastern theology of the Theotokos comes through in the Eastern hymn to her on this Dormition feast:
In giving birth you retained your virginity;
and in Dormition you did not forsake the world, O Theotokos.
You were translated unto life, being the Mother of Life.
And thus by virtue of your intercessions,
You deliver our souls from death.
“In Dormition you did not forsake the world”: like your Son, Jesus, O Mother of God, your departure from the world made you more present to it, not less, by the power of the Spirit in whom you now are fully alive by having died to this world. Anglicans are not especially known for their veneration of this Feast, but the theology of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, particularly the Eastern-inspired Suffrages at Vespers in Rite One seems intuitively apt here: after asking that we “depart this life in thy faith and fear, and not be condemned before the dread judgment seat of Christ,” we ask too, as though in an Orthodox litany, “that we may be bound together by thy Holy Spirit in the communion of all thy saints, entrusting one another and all thy life to Christ,” indeed, paraschou, Kyrie. It is the Holy Spirit who binds together the communio sanctorum, of which Mary is as though the golden clasp, a brooch upon the priestly sash of Christ whose body they and we are: it is by the Spirit that Mary, Mother of Life, saves our souls from death with ceaseless intercessions on our behalf.
You see, one believes into the Dormition less by historical testimony (which again is quite lacking) and more by the experience of Mary’s maternal presence to the Christian life, in liturgy, at prayer, in the small niches of grace that she has filled with herself throughout the cosmos just as Christ in ascending has filled all things with himself. She is the sweetness of May air, and the early hints of autumnal relief from summer heat as August wanes, as though gentler winds promising the Fall were some of her last breaths gone out like zephyrs into the air, returned each year at her leisure. She is now the creaturely beauty of everything, even as Christ is the Divine Wisdom of everything (and even Christ’s summation in his human nature of all creation is really her presence to the universe, since it is after all her humanity). She is bride to God, but she has also been the true love of every poet and knight, every woman or man seeking God in the bedroom, for what point is there in her perennial virginity if it is not that by dedicating her body to God her soul might become the very beacon of the eros of God and self for the world? She is every lovely thing. She is mother to God as well, and so therefore mother to all of us. But she is also daughter, the daughter: anyone who has daughters venerate her in loving all of their preciousness, tenacity, intelligence, and power. All of this we experience and name by her daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly in ways that we never would have had she not departed, just as had Christ not departed there would be no Spirit to facilitate her presence to us and ours to her in the first place.
And this very mode and manner of being present to the world is also the paradigm of our own departure from this life. Early Christians debated if death was the doorway to a waiting room or the wedding feast itself, that is, if the Kingdom for which Christ labored would indeed be realized in this world with apocalyptic theater and pageantry or if, already being realized in the heavens, it was simply a matter of cosmic progression towards it. Irenaeus represented the first view, Origen the second, Augustine something of a via media between the two with his Two Cities and amillenialism. But whatever the case ultimately with the cosmos, it is clear that death begins a profound journey for us, one in which we shall need all kinds of help we cannot now guess, and through which we shall come to places and states far beyond our ken, perhaps by circuits we could not have imagined. Christ and Mary have gone ahead of us; so too have the other saints. They both help us along the way and stand as hope that we too can make it where they now are. It is, after all, our souls that we praise Mary for saving from death, not simply our bodies: embodiment only ever reflects what is going on in the soul anyway. And Mary will accompany our souls: in the grand reversal, she will take us into her own from that day forward (Jn 19:27). And so, as she closes her eyes in this world for the final time, as the year begins to turn its face towards the long decline into autumn and winter, we must train ourselves to hear above tears and mourning Christ’s own voice of reassurance: “It is good for you that I should go away…”
Beautiful! Thanks for this, David.
Thank you for this, David.