Graces of the Assumption
When she comes to God on
the day of her Assumption, she simply returns home to the place that was hers
from the start, a place so familiar to her... she thus experiences in her
Assumption: this is where I always was...
If we think now about Mary, we know that she has a place
in God's saving plan, a home, where she was "chosen before the foundation
of the world" to be the Saviour's Mother, "to be holy and blameless
before him" (Eph 1:4). Surely she never left that place as she became a
person in time and lived out her entire existence on earth. When she comes to
God on the day of her Assumption, she simply returns home to the place that was
hers from the start, a place so familiar to her (for it is the revelation of
her real being) that she instantly knows "this is where I have always
been". And this takes place not merely as an idea or or divine intention
is finally realised; rather, it is because the deepest being of the Virgin
Mother was always identical with this idea, and she thus experiences in her
Assumption: this is where I always was....
We are not Mary. We do not yet correspond in this
"foreign land" to God's conception of us as his child. Yet at the
same time something of the completed mystery of Mary is already present in us.
We do not know how deep a truth lies in the statement that Christ "gave
those who received him the power to become children of God" (Jn 1:12), not
in a vague and figurative sense but in the fact that we are born by grace with
him from God the Father....
Already here the chosen ones are carried over into the
realm of God through the Word God inserts into their hearts.... Because we are
already children of the Father and members of Christ and have the Holy Spirit
in our hearts calling, "Abba, Father" (Rom 8:15), just as the Son
called to the Father (Mk 14:36), our homecoming to the conception God has of us
eternally is an arrival at the place from which we originated, at the place in
which we have been eternally in our own most intimate truth and reality. Only
from that place can we measure how far away we were while we wandered sinful
and imperfect like the lost son of the parable, who finally set his sights on
his father's house and was received therein by his father.
HANS URS VON BALTHASAR
Father von Balthasar (d. 1988)
was an eminent Swiss Catholic theologian and
co-founder of a religious community.
His extensive writings were an important influence
on Blessed John Paul II.
was an eminent Swiss Catholic theologian and
co-founder of a religious community.
His extensive writings were an important influence
on Blessed John Paul II.