Excerpt from Life Everlasting: The Mystery and the Promise

The Mystery of Our Lady's Assumption

by Rev. Msgr J. Brian Bransfield I remember second grade very well. That was the year my class began to learn times-tables and multiplication. I was excited to learn this new, unexplored area of math. In second grade, one of the other things we had to memorize was the list of Holy Days. I knew the list of Holy Days much better than I did my times-tables because with Holy Days we had a day off from school to attend Mass with our family! Holy Days were easy and fun to remember. After all, we looked forward to a day off for weeks ahead of time! So, I remembered them easily: November 1 was All Saints Day, December 8 was the Immaculate Conception and so on. But there was one Holy Day I would always forget on every quiz and test. That was the Solemnity of the Assumption which we celebrate on August 15. I forgot it not out of any lack of reverence, but because it occurred during the summer. We were already off from school – so there was no day off attached! My method of memorization didn’t work! As I grew, I learned that the Assumption is a Holy Day very worth remembering. It is the day we celebrate the passing of the sinless Blessed Virgin Mary, at the end of her earthly life, body and soul, into the joy and glory of heaven.  Questions about what happens to us when we die perplex us. That is why I wrote Life Everlasting: The Mystery and the Promise. This area of our faith is often new and unexplored for many people. I wanted Life Everlasting to be presented in an easy to understand style – so we can all learn about the saving work of Jesus. Life Everlasting even includes a section on how the mystery of Our Lady’s Assumption is a mystery of salvation from which we receive a multiplicity of graces. This year, as we celebrate this tremendous feast let us remember the great saving deeds of God.

Excerpt from Life Everlasting: The Mystery and the Promise

One of the great tasks of the New Evangelization is to restore to us in an explicit manner the undeniable awareness of our grand calling and dignity. It is this: Death seems so alien to us precisely because something of forever lies within us. We can sense it. We can imagine forever. Because human beings have a beginning, the moment of our conception, we cannot imagine what it is to have always existed, to have no beginning. Only God is eternal, that is, without beginning or end. We can, however, imagine forever, immortality. As I gazed into the coffin at the wake I was not simply sensing the fear of the nothingness of death, anxiety at its spookiness, or panic that those around me would also one day die. I was, in fact, sensing the more than. I had stumbled upon that beautiful notion of the Book of Ecclesiastes: “God . . . has put the timeless into their hearts so they cannot find out, from beginning to end, the work which God has done” (3:11 NAB). I was sensing the transcendence of the human person. I was discovering that death doesn’t fit. In the light of all the meaning, purpose, and beauty of the world around me, death simply didn’t fit. It didn’t fit with goodness. Death had won the battle in a man’s physical life, but not the war.

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