I noticed a new plant in my garden the other day. We moved into our home in the dead of winter this past year, so this spring and summer have been like one, elongated Christmas morning wherein I frequently walk out to another unexpected bloom. I keep thinking what a sweet gift these flowers are--owned by me and yet coming into existence completely unaided and even unknown by me.
I began noticing these surprise lilies (as they are called) all over town this week, and each little clump of them made me think how wonderful it is that we all are being given this gift at the same time. In lawns and ditches and gardens all over Nebraska, God chose this week to gently unfold the surprise lily, purely for the enjoyment of those who lay eyes on it and those who get the privilege of housing it on their land for a while.
Also this week, because today is the Feast of the Assumption, I have been trying to learn more about this teaching and gift of our faith. I tell you about the flower because those two musings came together eventually, but first the Assumption. The Assumption refers to the day when, at the end of her earthly life, God assumed Mary, body and soul, into heaven to begin living out what we are all called to: eternal life face to face with God.
This week I am struck by two aspects of the Assumption. First, the personal importance it holds for the two individuals involved: Mary, a mother, and Jesus, her son. And second, the start of a particularly excessive gift from God to all and each of us.
So, to treat the first. I’ve always thought of the Assumption within the context of a dogmatic teaching that sets Catholics apart and often in contention with our Protestant brothers and sisters. This year, God invited me to stop and look at this great celebration for what it is at its most basic: the fulfillment of a mother’s longing to be with her son, who had died.
This week in prayer I imagined myself in Mary’s situation with my own son. I know many mothers are in reality in the same situation as Mary, and she is particularly close with them. But even just in my hypothetical contemplation, I wanted nothing more than to be with my son again. I felt a sudden, strong surge of longing. If we can imagine how we ourselves would feel to long for a child who has gone before us, how much more must Mary have felt that longing in the years between Jesus’s Ascension and her Assumption! In her, the desire to be reunited with her lost child and to be united with the Lord is uniquely one and the same, and so, I think, all the more intense was her waiting and wanting.
Then picture the overwhelming, other-worldly joy in the moments when Mary, having just been assumed into heaven, walked up to Jesus as her child welcomed her home. She placed her hand on the scruffy cheek of the man whom she had rocked to sleep as a baby and proceeded to brush a happy tear away from his eye, just as she had when she met him along the way to his crucifixion. Mother and Son both smiled at each other in a knowing way, for their life together was filled with such intimate warmth and humor that they both recalled and resumed now . . . If Jesus had no other reason to raise his Mother body and soul into heaven but for these moments between the two of them of touches and smiles and crinkly eyes full of tears, it would have been reason enough.
Our God is a God of abundance—of pure, unreasoned excess.
And that is what the gift of Mary and the gift of the surprise lilies have in common. As these two ideas were bouncing around in my head this week, I came across a quote in an unlikely place that brought them together and made one enlighten the other. The quote comes from the literary sleuth Sherlock Holmes who says:
“What a lovely thing a rose is! . . . Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
I have often heard objections to Catholics’ devotion to Mary that center on the insistence that we don’t need her, for we have all that we do need in God. It is true that He didn’t need her to come into the world, didn’t need to be nursed and raised by her, and didn’t need to raise her into heaven where she participates in His work of salvation as our spiritual Mother—but He did. We do need her in that God Himself chose to need her. Because He is a God of abundance. He does not choose only what is necessary for our existence. The flowers are proof of that.
Mary is our white rose, our surprise lily, the gift given to us which we neither merited nor strictly required, but whom God found it fitting and delightful to give all and each of us, in particular on this feast of the Assumption. In Mary, God does give us more than what we need, and so she is all the more worthy to be cherished, admired, and loved by us.
“It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.” - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Naval Treaty
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