Feast Of The Assumption

    

August 15, Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the Mother of God. Here in the fullness of Lion’s Gate and Lughnasadh, the summer harvest festival, the Church places the glorious celebration of the Mother’s body, assumed into Paradise. Not just her soul, but every jot and tittle of her flesh.

This is her banquet of organic delights, Earth garlanded with dahlia bling in Pagan fullness, each pollen mote, each ear of wheat or aster grail, brimful with the Christall sun.

The art of the Church, like the art of Buddhist and Tantric mandalas, is a symbolic language. Lush paintings of Mary’s Assumption remind us that divine love transfigures not just soul but flesh into the fire of God. Mary’s bodily assumption into “heaven” foreshadows what Teilhard called “the divinization of matter.” But her bodily assumption is just the first fruit of the human race, for our own bodies, even unto the twirling chromosome, must ascend as well. How? By descending into Matter. We also are assumed bodily into Paradise, moment by moment, in a ceaseless revelation of the cosmic dance.

Mary is Mater, Mother, Matter. In the Northern hemisphere, at this season, undulations of Consciousness reach full embodiment through the grace of the Mother’s dance. Gaia bears the golden Son of God in every bindhu of loam. We sing not only the wave nature of Light, but Christ incarnate in each particle of mass and density. Soon the Christic energy will kindle into russet leaf-fire, crinkle and fade back to the ground of darkness, to re-ignite the un-created seed at Winter Solstice. We honor this pulse of creation and return in the circle of the year. For time itself is a mandala, a sacred circle, that keeps bringing us back to our center.

What is the message of this feast? Simply this: we are here to delight in every sensuous perception. Not to be so caught up in the intellect, in our endless gray fog of thought, but to delight our lips and eyes with the presence of God in Matter. Only by taking form through the grace of Matter may Consciousness perceive itself and wake up, crying with delight, “I Am!”

The diamond hologram of God perceives itself, tastes itself, through our senses, awakening I Am in myriad facets of delight. We give thanks for the cornucopia that is Mary’s body.

Why are you here? To delight in dust, an alder leaf unfolding, turning gold, trembling on the twig, falling into the breeze. You are not here to be a victim. You are not here to complain, or worry about tomorrow, or speculate about when the Shift will happen. You ARE the Shift.

Next to the power of consciousness itself, your greatest gift is sensation. Please don't let your mind, with its anxious inventions called “yesterday” and “tomorrow,” come between the I Am and its delight in a bursting dahlia, the cry of a frog from you geranium pot, or the visionary thrill of a hummingbird’s wings, which are there yet not there.

Don’t allow thinking to rob you of the privilege of glutting your vision in the blues of the sky, tasting a filament of honeysuckle, or feeling the electric fur of a golden dog. Each moment of your sensory delight helps the Mother’s body ascend, and foreshadows the Omega Point of glory. What is glory? “Doxa” in the Greek, “Kavoth” in the Hebrew, that luminous state of grace when there shall finally be no difference between Spirit and Matter.

Be courageous. Well up out of your own Heart like a tear. Ripen and drop. Learn to be a fallen apple. Let a late Autumn star beam bubble up your juices in the afternoon. Let the worm chew dark holes through your sweetness. You need holes to make music, like a hollow reed, empty spaces the Spirit can breathe through.

Turn off the news, the iPhone, the AI bot. Go outside. The hero’s journey home is simply a barefoot ramble through the bee-mad meadow. Join the silent riot of drunken poppies. Pluck and taste a blackberry. Hear the lingering breath of green in a vein of wind-wound sycamore. Welcome the prick of a thorn with the scent of every blossom. For presence is impermanence.

Soon enough you’ll see this cloud-like exhalation disappearing on a windowpane. Pique of Samhain. Wabi Sabi. Your seeds will rattle in a hollow gourd, your ruined garden shrouded by a holy mist. So take the bread of this moment and eat, for this is the body of the Mother, given for you.

It is only here on this compost heap, in the crack and crazing of earthenware flesh, that Mary fattens her belly with Jesus fruit, and Christ spins the infinite through Matter’s loom. Here, only here, the Bridal Chamber opens its secret door, and you gaze into the pistil of a rose.

 

Image: by Fra Angelico