A cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker some decades ago depicted a weary looking angel sitting on a cloud, a harp lying at his feet. The caption underneath read something along the lines of: "If I'd known Heaven would go on for this long, I'd have brought some magazines."
The difficulty with trying to imagine what Heaven might be like is that it transcends all earthly experience. We might be tempted to think that Hell is not so difficult to visualise, because attempts during the last century to create earthly utopias without regard for the laws which God has written into human nature have gone some way to creating it on this planet. However, even within the most ghastly socialist gulag or death camp, we still find glimpses of heroism and sacrificial generosity which remind us that in this life redemption (and with it the attainment of everlasting life in Heaven) always remains possible if only hearts are opened to the working of God's grace. The utter and irreversible desolation of Hell is only possible when we have stubbornly closed ourselves to God's promptings through to the moment when our bodies and souls are finally separated, and mercifully that is something that no-one reading this has ever experienced, nor ever need to.
This month, we celebrate the great feast of Our Lady's magnificent Assumption into Heaven. Rather than taking the Blessed Virgin away from us, this glorious mystery and event actually brings Heaven closer to us. In His Ascension, Our Lord took His humanity along with His divinity (and including His flesh) into heavenly Glory. In the Assumption, He received His Blessed Mother, body and soul, into the Heavenly Court, where She would take Her place by His throne as Queen Mother. While the other saints await their reunification with their bodies at the end of time when Our Lord returns to judge the living and the dead, Our Lady's body is already in Heaven. This explains why, while we honour the relics of many saints here on earth, we find no mortal remains of Our Lady to venerate. The presence of at least two bodies in Heaven, through the Ascension and the Assumption, makes Heaven a real place, because bodies exist in places, not merely in "states".
The Blessed Virgin's Assumption is our assurance that our bodies as well as our souls have been created to participate in everlasting glory. Death was never a part of God's intention for the human race, and only became a feature of our human story thanks to sin. The Assumption demonstrates par excellence that Our Lord's victory over sin in His Passion and Resurrection is complete and definitive. Monsignor Ronald Knox described the Assumption as Our Lord's "first step to reconciling all things in heaven and on earth to his eternal Father, towards making all things new". With all the trouble our bodies give us now, some might wish that salvation meant being liberated from them forever. But God is no Platonist, and when He surveyed His work at the end of the sixth day of creation, with Adam and Eve at the apex of that creation and mankind as the hinge that fused the material realm with the spiritual, and saw "that it was very good", it was His plan that this most wondrous and unique of His creatures should be raised to participate in His glory in the fullness of being in Heaven, matter as well as spirit.
So what about that harp, and those magazines? We need not worry about ever wearying of the marvels of Heaven. God is infinite in all of His perfections. Eternity is beyond and outside of time, but to use a temporal analogy it may be said that we could behold the Beatific Vision for a thousand trillion years and yet hardly should we have begun to scratch the surface of His majesty or to fathom the depths of that dynamic of love which flows eternally between Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and into which we have already been inserted in our Baptism. Even though the best we can do now is to see through a glass darkly, meditating on the infinite marvels and blessedness of Heaven helps to put our earthly troubles into perspective. Our Lady participated in Our Lord's Passion in a unique manner as a sword of anguish pierced Her Immaculate Heart, and now She participates to the highest possible degree in His glory in eternity. As we survey the Church on earth wounded by scandals, division and dissent, we can take heart in the truth that Our Lady's Assumption prefigures the moment when the Church Militant on earth will be subsumed and glorified in the Church Triumphant in Heaven. During this month of the Assumption, let us fix our gaze on eternity and ask the Queen of the Angels to intercede for us in our efforts to build the Kingdom of Heaven in the here and now.
Father Julian Large