When I meditate on the mystery of the Assumption, I’m reminded of an experience as a hospice volunteer that’s been a blessing in my life. I was spending time with a lovely elderly lady who was dying of cancer, providing respite care so her husband could have time to run some errands. She looked very beautiful, despite her sickness, with a radiance about her that testified to her deep faith. She usually was sleeping or resting while I stayed with her, and it was the story a nurses aide related to me that I remember.
The aide would help to give her a bath and help with personal cares, so she was often awake to interact with this aide. As she was nearing death and that time when a person is living both in this world and beginning to enter the next, the aide was asking her about her life and what she had experienced in all those years. The lady spoke about a dream she had had to run a day care center and take care of little ones, but that dream had never materialized. The aide suggested that in heaven she could have a beautiful day care for all the children there, and the lady smiled at her and said yes, and she would take care of the aide’s three little ones who were in heaven.
The aide was taken aback, and asked how could she know that she had lost three babies to miscarriages – she had never told her about that. But the lady knew – she was so close to the other side that she knew, and the smile on her face at the happy thought of caring for them affirmed that inner knowing.
Mary our Mother was assumed body and soul into heaven; this is our faith, and the witness of a kind and gentle soul who was about to go to meet her has reassured me of the truth of this belief…
Lord God, thank You for the gift of faith that beckons me to the eternal life promised in the Scriptures. May the knowledge of Mary’s entrance to heaven console and encourage us as we mourn the loss of those we have loved here on earth ~
(re-visit from Rosary Reflection, 4th Glorious Mystery, the Assumption)
Spiritual Sun Pennies 