15 August 2020
Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
An elderly priest once told me the following story, which occurred sometime during the first few years of his priesthood.
One day while he was sitting in his office, his secretary poked her head in and said, “Father, there is a little girl here who wants to talk to you.” Annoyed, he told the secretary to send her away. This occurred a few more times. Days later he was in the church preparing things for Mass the following day and, suddenly, there was a little girl standing there, a look of frustration on her face; she could not have been more than five years old. He greeted her and asked what was wrong. “God loves you more than me,” she said. “Well,” the priest answered, “maybe you should talk to Him about that.” She crossed her arms and stomped off while he returned to the task at hand, glad that she seemed to take the hint. In minutes, however, she had returned, saying, “God says He loves you more than me because you are poorer than I am.” Bothered by the interruption but also unnerved by the wisdom he could sense in the girl’s words, he said, “Little girl, would you like to see the rest of the church?” His hope was that he could bore her into leaving. He led her all about, explaining every image and statue, and all the furnishings in great detail, and to his dismay the little girl eagerly drank all of it in. Finally they came upon a statue of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, and the priest thought to try explaining the theology of the Immaculate Conception to her, hoping perhaps to succeed in boring her and getting her to depart.
“This is a statue of the Immaculate Conception,” he said, “Do you know what that means?” The little girl nodded her head. “Yes, but I want to hear you explain it.” He tried, finding it to be a bit of a struggle to explain the theology of Original Sin and other things in a way that the young girl could understand. When he had finished, the girl said matter-of-factly, “That’s not what she told me.” The priest asked who “she” was. “Mary,” the girl said, pointing at the foot of the statue, where Our Lady’s heel was on the head of a serpent, “The heel is the most humble part of the body, and Mary is the most humble part of the Body of Christ. So she gets to step on the snake.” The priest was amazed, and told me that he never again ignored anything a child had to say.
What this blessed child reminds us of is the importance of those childlike virtues we have reflected upon this week: trust and humility in particular. No one in all of Christian history trusted God more than Our Lady, and no one was more humble than “…His lowly servant.” Today we celebrate the Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven, when she was taken body and soul to her heavenly reward; truly the words of Jesus from Tuesday’s Gospel have come to pass: “…unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Is there anyone in Heaven greater than Mary, save for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? No, because there is no human being who ever lived more humble than she who referred to herself before the mighty angel as “…the handmaid of the Lord,” (Luke 1:38). Let us then not merely look to Our Lady for inspiration and help, but to recall that she is our Mother (John 19:27); allow her to raise you as she raised her Son.