A Homily for the Feast of the Assumption 
Readings: Vigil: 1 Chronicles 15:3-4, 15-16; 16:1-2  1 Corinthians 15:54b-57  Luke 11:27-28
Mass during the Day: Revelation 11:19A; 12:1-6A, 10AB  1 Corinthians 15:20-27  Luke 1:39-56

Ludwig Wittgenstein, a giant of 20th-century philosophy, famously wrote: “Death is not an event in life. We do not live to experience death.” He meant that death itself is a terminus. It is not one more part of our lives. Because consciousness ends with death, no one alive experiences it. 

True enough, though not immediately obvious. We need not fear the exact moment of death because we will never be conscious of it, at least not with an earthly consciousness. 

No, it is not the last moment that should terrify us. It is what comes before. 

The diagnosis. Do you fight it? Can you win? And how long can you go on, not knowing the answer to those questions? The treatments are often worse than the illness, making us sicker, claiming more and then more of our time. Life begins to shrink to the confines of a clinic or a bed. Even those who are determined to accompany us know that they will live on and that we will not. What greater wedge can be driven into love than the knowledge that one lover has a future and the other does not? All our life we have been moving forward toward some goal, but now there is no future, nothing to strive toward. We have only to await the arrival of the final agony.

So, Wittgenstein is right. It is not death we must fear. It is dying. 

Skeptics like to say that if all the fragments of the true cross, scattered across the world in reliquaries, were reassembled, they would make a battleship. This much is certain: The desire to have relics of our Lord and his first disciples outpaced the supply. Somehow, Christians even managed to collect some of the Virgin’s breast milk. 

How odd then, the absence of her bones! Why would the most prized of her relics be missing? And how could the conviction that she was assumed, body and soul, into heaven even have arisen if someone could have claimed possession of her remains?

This is a telling historical anomaly, but the theological insight that accompanies it is perhaps more meaningful. Because she never sinned, because of a prevenient grace on the part of her Son and Savior and her own cooperation with it, the Virgin did not experience death as we do, under the reign, the dismal influence, of sin. 

No, the church very early began to speak of her falling asleep, the way a child does when the world surrounding the crib is safe.

If by “death” you mean, “Did Mary pass from this world to the next as all of us must?” then she did. But if you speak of the dissolution of hope, the severing from all that we have loved and trusted, she did not experience this. One might say that the Virgin shares our death but not our dying. Her consciousness never catapulted toward some final catastrophe. 

The absence of her relics supports this conclusion, but so too does our own experience of the death of saints. Though they share our sin and thus our closing suffering, they die differently from most. They enter death with a resolution born of grace.

Consider one example, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who died of tuberculosis at age 24. She suffered from the disease for more than a year, always begging to be allowed to continue her duties as a cloistered Carmelite nun. 

Like other Carmelites of the time, Thérèse refused morphine, choosing to offer her suffering for the good of souls. By the end, she was continually hemorrhaging, the disease racking her entire body with pain. And we now know that the mercury she was given to fight the infection contributed to her death.

The approach of death had its spiritual terrors as well. Thérèse confessed in her journal:

Suddenly the fog which surrounds me becomes more dense; it penetrates my soul and envelops it in such a way that it is impossible to discover within it the sweet image of my Fatherland; everything has disappeared! When I want to rest my heart fatigued by the darkness which surrounds it, by the memory of the luminous country after which I aspire, my torment redoubles; it seems to me that the darkness, borrowing the voice of sinners, says mockingly to me: “You are dreaming about the light, about a fatherland embalmed in the sweetest perfumes; you are dreaming about the eternal possession of the Creator of all these marvels; you believe that one day you will walk out of this fog which surrounds you. Advance, advance; rejoice in death which will give you not what you hope for but a night still more profound, the night of nothingness.”

Thérèse of Lisieux died as we do, but she died a saint, somewhere between the passing of the Virgin and the death of a sinner. 

Shortly before her death, Thérèse prayed that her suffering be acceptable to God, that he would use it to bless all the children in the world being baptized that day. One of them, Giovanni Battista Montini, baptized that day in Lombardy, would become Pope Paul VI. 

Thérèse spoke her last words while looking at her crucifix: “Oh, I love him. My God, I love you.” 

I wonder, could those have been Mary’s last words as well?

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.