Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” (Luke 1.39-42)
Released in the summer of 1982, the Steven Speilberg movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial became an overnight success, becoming the highest grossing film of all time for the next eleven years, until Speilberg’s movie Jurassic Park surpassed the earlier movie. Forty years later, E.T. is still considered one of the greatest films of all time, not only winning four Academy Awards, but also being added to the Library of Congress because of its “cultural, historical, and aesthetical significance.”
Probably familiar to almost all of us, the storyline of the movie focuses on an extra-terrestrial creature, E.T., who is left behind when his ship of alien botanists are raided by American government agents one night as they make a secret visit to Earth to gather specimens in a forest in California. Found later in the family’s tool shed by a ten-year-old boy named Elliot, E.T. and the boy become fast friends, so close that they fully empathize with one another, feeling whatever the other feels.
Perhaps the most moving segment of the film comes when E.T. one night points his long finger into the sky and says to Elliot, “Phone. Home. Home phone.” Watching E.T.’s deterioration, corresponding to his own weakening, Elliot realizes that E.T. cannot survive on earth, although he had promised the extra-terrestrial, “You could be happy here. I could take care of you. I wouldn’t let anybody hurt you. We could grow up together, E.T.”
Helping E.T. build a device to phone home, Elliott soon finds himself butting heads with government agents who have been spying on him and who find E.T. in his bedroom. The young boy tells one of them, “He needs to go home. He’s calling his people. And I don’t know where they are, but he needs to go home.” With the ensuing obligatory chase scene, Elliott and E.T. escape from the agents, returning to the same forest in which he had been abandoned earlier.
There, a spaceship awaits him and, as E.T.’s heart again begins to glow, he says goodbye to Elliott, telling him “I’ll be right here,” as he points his glowing finger to Elliott’s forehead. As Elliott watches, the spaceship ascends, with E.T. safely aboard, leaving behind a rainbow in the sky. Often portrayed as a Christian parable, which Speilberg denied, the association was augmented by the movie poster that showed E.T.’s finger reaching out to touch Elliott’s finger, reminiscent of Michaelangelo’s painting of the creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel.
That the movie has evoked strong sentiments from the start, giving it staying power through the years, attests to its resonance with the human experience, especially the deep-down sense that we all have when speaking of our wanting to go home. There is within each of us an existential desire to go home, however distant in the past our home is, a condition that the writer Frederick Buechner calls “a chronic and incurable homesickness.”
Sharing his sentiments in his book, The Longing for Home, Buechner writes, “The longing for home is so universal a form of longing that there is even a special word for it, which is of course homesickness.” Digging deep beneath the surface of the longing, Buechner sees a more fundamental homesickness at play. He writes, “I also know the sense of sadness and lostness that comes with feeling that you are a stranger and exile on the earth and that you would travel to the ends of that earth and beyond if you thought you could ever find the homeland that up till now you have only glimpsed from afar.”
Building on the words of the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews found in the Christian corpus, Buechner quotes the chapter and the verse, “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland.”
Buechner then asks, “What is the connection between the home we knew and the home we dream?” He writes, “I believe that what we long for most in the home we knew is the peace and charity that, if we were lucky, we first came to experience there, and I believe that it is that same peace and charity we dream of finding once again in the home that the tide of time draws us toward.” With that thought firmly embraced, he concludes, “The first home foreshadows the final home, and the final home hallows and fulfills what was most precious in the first.”
Unlikely companions at first glance, Speilberg and Buechner both recognize, one cinematically, the other philosophically, that fundamental experience of every human person on earth, that singular sense that we are exiles here on earth and, as a result, that our home is not here. Although we have “homes” here, they are temporary shelters, faint images of the true home that once was ours and that once again will be ours when we find our way back there.
With these thoughts as the background, we are better able to appreciate the Roman Catholic feast that we celebrate today called the Assumption of Mary into heaven, which carried in the Eastern Orthodox Church an earlier title of the Dormition of Mary, or the falling asleep of Mary. Both titles are celebrated on the same day, August 15th, and both attest to the taking up into heaven of Mary, the mother of the Galilean Rabbi called Jesus.
While much ink has been expended in offering a theological support for this extra-canonical belief, the essence of the belief is simple and straightforward, especially when seen from the perspective of the human yearning for returning home. In short, the assumption of Mary encapsulates that existential experience that we, all of us, are exiles on earth, awaiting a return home, a place where we once lived and where we once again will live when our life on earth is done.
Perhaps it is this same thought that suggested itself to the spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen, when he wrote in his book, Finding My Way Home, that the story of Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth, which provides the scriptural reading for today’s feast, is “one of the most beautiful passages of Scripture.” Using this text, Nouwen speaks at length of the human experience of waiting, which both Mary and Elizabeth experienced as they awaited the birth of their sons.
Nouwen finds in these two women’s experiences a paradigm for every person’s waiting, “the knowledge,” as he says, “that Someone wants to address us.” That Someone, of course, is our Maker, the Most High God, who conceived us in his heart before he conceived us in the womb of our mothers and who breathed the breath of life into us before we took our first breath on earth.
In his typically beautiful and artistic way, Nouwen inverts the waiting, or pairs it, with the waiting of God, our primordial parent, who, as he says, “waits for us to share in his deepest love.” Seeing life as a series of passages, each a stop on the road in which we have the opportunity to give love as God gives love, Nouwen understands then that our death is “our final passage, our exodus to the full realization of our identity as God’s beloved children and to full communion with the God of love.”
That, of course, is at the heart of the belief in the assumption of Mary into heaven, her radical giving of love when she agreed to become the mother of God’s only son, reciprocated by God’s radical giving of his love when he returned her to his home in heaven after her days were done, her task completed, her reunion with him a celebratory feast in the banquet hall of his celestial home.
If understood in this way, Mary’s assumption becomes the prototype for our own return home, an embrace also awaiting us as we cross the threshold that separates earth from heaven, a welcome home for us after a long sea voyage akin to Homer’s Odyssey, filled with similar trials and temptations, never deterred in our quest, but determined in the face of every challenge because our eyes are always set on our destination, our homeland.
That Mary is granted this special grace because of her special role in God’s plan does not dampen our own hopes for a similar grace because, in the end, we all share a special role in God’s plan, each one of us called to give love as we have been given love, each of us placed on earth as a sign of God’s love that flows from our hearts into the hearts of every other creature alive in the world.
This becomes the “active waiting” that Nouwen pointed to when he spoke of Elizabeth and Mary, a waiting that is spent in an infusion of love into the world, a love that has God as its source and God as its end. He explained it in this way, “While our time on earth is very brief, we were loved by God before we were born and will continue to be loved by God after we die.” As he said, “This brief lifetime is an opportunity to receive love, deepen love, grow in love, and give love.”
Given that perspective, our years, spent in this way of active waiting, changes our exile into an exchange of love, our lives both transformed by love and transforming other lives by love, until, at last, we sleep, as did Mary, in the warm embrace of the One whose love never ceases, but whose love continues to breathe into our bodies even when they have been quieted by death.
Perhaps the preacher and writer Fred Craddock said it best, as he often does, in a story that he liked to tell, a story that reminds us that we were loved first by God and we will be loved last by God. As Craddock tells the story, years ago a baby was born in a small country hospital, a rare event in the 30-bed facility. All the family had gathered to welcome little Elizabeth into the world.
Along with the others, the chaplain on call came to congratulate the father, a young man of few words, as were most men in those parts. “What a beautiful baby,” the chaplain offered, as he looked through the glass of the nursery window, watching little Elizabeth squirm in her bassinet. And, even with the glass between them, they could hear the baby, red-faced, screaming her lungs out.
Wanting to offer the dad some assurance, assuming he might be concerned about the loud noises coming from his newborn baby, the chaplain explained that he was sure she wasn’t sick, just that “it was good for babies to scream and do all that because it clears out the lungs and gets their voices going.” As he assured the man, “It’s all right.”
The dad turned to the chaplain and said, “Oh, I know that she’s not sick. She’s just mad as hell.” Then catching himself in the presence of the chaplain and realizing his choice of words, he said, “Pardon me, Reverend.” “That’s fine,” the chaplain said, “but tell me, why is it you say she’s mad?” “Well,” the young dad answered, “Wouldn’t you be mad? One minute you’re with God in heaven and the next minute you’re in Georgia?”
Pondering the man’s words for a moment, the chaplain asked, “You believe she was with God before she came here?” “Oh, yeah,” the young dad answered. “You think she’ll remember?” the chaplain asked. The dad looked at the chaplain and said, “Well, that’s up to her mother and me. It’s up to you. We’ve got to see that she remembers because, if she forgets, she’s a goner.”
Well spoken, those words from the young dad, a reminder to the rest of us that we also have to remember that we were with God before we came here and we are meant to be with God when we leave here. Mary, described by the evangelist Luke as one who liked to ponder things in her heart, surely remembered this truth of life on earth. She lived accordingly.
Her assumption into heaven reminds us to live accordingly as well, or else we might end up goners.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 