[December 9th]

The Assumption

I swear I'll get more reliable with these. Someday. My celebration of finishing the semester involved alcohol and then I would have been no good to you.

I often think here that the reason the Assumption of Mary into Heaven had to happen is because her body, the first tabernacle, the body through which Christ came into the world, was something too precious for us to have. We would make an idol of it or destroy it. We would sully its true meaning.

And maybe that's still partially true, but why this had to happen has more to do with the fact that then it would be ours. Her body would then become something for us. A powerful thing, a faith-creating thing no doubt, and perhaps she would have been fine with that, but it seems unaccountably wrong to take her body, the great Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, away from her control. Out of her hands.

Especially because not so very long ago that's like all we wanted to do to women. Take away their bodies. And that rhetoric is not used by the pro-choice movement, but I'm talking about things like the creepy "Junior Dad's Weekend" that recently happened at Mary Baldwin College in which junior college girls receive a ring from their father upon promising to maintain fidelity to him until their marriage (evidenced by their chastity). Which is creepy on so many levels as the ceremony basically is a wedding for fathers and daughters and was started in the 1970s.

And St. Jerome, a Father of the Church, once wrote (after murdering through excessive penance-encouraging a woman named Blessilla) that it was a shame that Blessilla would only be in the third room away from God - because no matter how holy she became (praised by him for coming to the point where she mourned the loss of her virginity more than the death of her husband), her place in heaven was determined by, essentially, the state of her hymen. Virgins are in the closest room, then mothers in the second and married women without children in the third. Presumably any other kind of woman was not granted admittance.

Women as property. Women's bodies as something outside of their control.

Spirituality as a way of women to get out of their bodies.

You should see the crazy stuff men wrote about women's bodies in ages past. And not just the Dark Ages or the Renaissance stuff I study. Freud was all messed up about women. Wandering uteruses were nineteenth century. Incapable of understanding masculine thoughts was twentieth. Forty years ago, Mary Baldwin College started making each of its students swear to remain chaste as their fathers placed rings on their fingers.

It's a good thing God didn't leave Mary's body down here. Think what we would have done to it or demanded of it or treated it like. Think how many men would have tried to own it (isn't that actually exactly what The Da Vinci Code was about for Mary Magdalene? The story of a massive two-thousand-year-old cult, mostly of old men, trying to get possession of the body of a woman who was supposedly married to Jesus Christ?).

But this is also important as a message for us: Mary, the Queen of Heaven, is in full possession of her body. She never lost it. She never gave it. She used it to serve God, and she was permitted to keep it past the threshold of death, so that she could take her seat in Heaven in the fullness of herself.

Our bodies are our selves. Giving away your body is giving away your self. Every time.

And I don't just mean sex or pregnancy. Whenever you let something or someone else tell you what to do with your body, you are giving away your self. When you let someone else define your body, you are giving away your self.

We know these things, and yet we still do this nonsense.

Mary, our ultimate role model, never lost possession of her body. Never let a man control or rule it. And God would not let it be a pawn in any man's (or other woman's) game down here as we make a mess of religion for over two thousand years.

We shouldn't let ours be used thus either.