Assumption Reflection

Eighty years ago, almost to the day, at eleven o’clock in the morning the second nuclear bomb detonated directly above the Catholic cathedral in Nagasaki, Japan. A week later, August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption, hostilities ended. It was also the day my maternal grandfather died… and on August 16^th sixty one years later his daughter (my mother) died also.

The second world war had raged for six years and the conflict had claimed millions of lives. In Russia alone some 20 million had perished. Thirty thousand had died in Britain during the constant German air raids. Dresden had been fire bombed; six million Jews, Gypsies and others considered outsiders died in the concentration camps. The mud of the Kokoda track swallowed Australian troops as they tried to stem the Japanese advance on Port Moresby. The world seemed aflame with conflict… Perhaps the nuclear bomb is a symbol of just how destructive the human race had become. Where was the joy of our shared humanity?

But somehow the various adversaries reached a moment when the fighting stopped and the guns fell silent. There was jubilation in the streets as the machinery of war ground to a halt. Yet all over lay the smear of war and the smell of defeated ideals. Nations now had the chance to breathe deeply and reflect on the cost of hostilities. Human dignity could make the painful crawl back from the brink of despair and self destruction.

The long memory of the church would proclaim in the years following the war what it had always harboured in its heart … that the charred cinders of Nagasaki and a thousand other battlefields are not our destiny. In making The Assumption of Mary an article of faith, we are assured of our dignity as the belov-ed of God. Here is the promise of eternal life. It is a profound doctrine because it speaks of the central mystery of Christianity… the paradox of the cross – that suffering, destruction and annihilation are not the ultimate reality, that death is not the end. Jesus has shown us this new reality by his own suffering, death and resurrection. It is the image of life beyond the grave, a life that Mary also now enjoys. It is the model we will follow.

Back to All Articles

Next Article