The Fourth Glorious Mystery - The Assumption

This mystery presents, perhaps most clearly, how concrete our hope in God is. It is as concrete as the fact that we are bodily creatures. What difference does it make for Christian hope? It is of revolutionary importance: we do not spend this present life trying to escape from the body, we do not believe that the body is evil. The Christian way of life is a witness to the fact that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It is in the body that we experience God and it is our hope and faith that we will rise again and live forever in our transfigured bodies. What it means exactly we still do not know, but we already know that Mary is the first disciple of Christ who is already with God body and soul. She is the one in whom the Holy Spirit lived most perfectly as she carried God’s Word in her body, and in her we see the model of the whole community of believers.

This obviously invites a deeper reflection on our attitude to ‘bodily matters’. Both our bodies and souls have been sanctified through Christ's death. If this is so then every act of violence, every suffering that we inflict on others, every help that we refuse to give to the hungry, is in a sense an act of desecration.

Perhaps awareness of the fact that our bodies are in such an intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit will help us understand the Christian stance on many ethical issues such as human-cell-engineering. Humanity is an ‘inspired’ race and Mary reminds us of it.