HOMILY FOR ASSUMPTION + ANNUAL ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE MASS – St. John’s College, University of Sydney

HOMILY FOR ASSUMPTION + ANNUAL ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE MASS
St. John’s College, University of Sydney
Solemnity of the Assumption of BVM, 15 August 2017

The website MyFreeImplants.com started in 2005 as a way to crowd-fund women who want breast implants. They create a profile and would-be donors can scroll through, access photos of them, even talk to them through live streaming, before making a donation. Although slammed by leading plastic surgeons as ‘degrading’, ‘sleazy’ and ‘exploitative’, the website has raised millions of dollars in funds. Co-founder Jay Moore, who got the idea from a waitress at a Las Vegas stag party, said Australia is one of the largest markets for the site.¹

Paradoxically our secular society both worships the body and demeans it. We turn a healthy concern for beauty and fitness into compulsive dieting, gym-addiction and cosmetic extravagance, devaluing anyone with an unfashionable physique. The same human body which is honoured by healthcare and Olympic medals, funerals and holy relics, is exploited by advertising and commerce, prostitution and pornography, or mutilated and destroyed by abortion and drugs, violence and suicide. Indeed, the body is often the battleground for the human soul in our society, especially for the souls of our young people.

After the horrors of the Second World War, in which crueller things were done to human bodies than at any time in history, it took a great act of faith and hope in humanity for Pope Pius XII to reaffirm the ancient faith of the Church and in 1950 declare the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary – which was, amongst other things, a declaration of reverence for the human body. Not all Christians have shared Pope Pius’ enthusiasm for the body. There has been a recurring tendency amongst Christians towards elevating the spiritual by demeaning the bodily, presenting body and soul as warring parties, prison and prisoner. But heresy this is: for as Pope John Paul II made so clear in his groundbreaking Theology of the Body, we are a unity in which the body is indispensable. Indeed, the Church celebrates the body and bodily life as good and beautiful. Man and woman are created in the image of a God who Himself took flesh as a man born of a woman.

Today’s Solemnity of the Assumption celebrates the first Christian body to enjoy glory. Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is called by Him to be with Him forever, “for the Almighty does great things for me” ^{(Lk 1:39-56)}. There are no half-measures in this summons: body and soul she enters into the risen life of her Son, for as St Paul taught, “as all men die in Adam, so will all be brought to life in Christ, but in their proper order: Christ first, and then His own.” ^{(1 Cor 15:20-26)} Such was the privilege of this perfect disciple of Christ whom all generations call ‘blessed’; such is the favour of the One kept in “a place of safety prepared for her by God” ^{(Rev 11:19; 12:1-6, 10)}. Yet far from being merely an interesting bit of Catholic mythology, this has real implications for students, here and now, at St John’s College, even, dare I say, for those who are not Catholic.

For in a culture like ours that in so many ways demeans, exploits, even abuses the body, in a university world that puts brains before brawn, the intellectual beyond the physical, words above deeds, Mary stands for a high view of the value of bodily life in service of the spiritual. After all, though Mary’s speech is recorded only four times in the Gospels, her physical presence is noted 24 times, as the way by which she exercises her ever ‘Yes’ to God. It is by her body that Mary nurtures the embryonic Jesus, brings Him forth as a baby, suckles, washes and consoles Him as a child, hugs and grieves for Him as a young man, receives His corpse as the Pietá. It is in her body that she moves around so much, from the Annunciation at Nazareth to the Visitation in the Judaean hills, back to Nazareth for her Wedding and to Bethlehem for the Nativity, off to Jerusalem for the Presentation and then to Egypt in flight from Herod, back to Nazareth for the Boy’s childhood and to Jerusalem for his Bar Mitzvah, Loss and Finding, to Cana for the Wedding Feast, Jerusalem for the crucifixion, and Heaven for her Assumption as “the woman adorned with the sun and standing on the moon” ^{(Rev 11:19; 12:1-6, 10)}… It is with her body that she sings to cousin Elizabeth tonight ^{(Lk 1:39-56)} and then assists as midwife, cares for her own family, celebrates with the young marrieds at Cana, joins her Son at times on the road and cares for Him, worships in the Temple, receives the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and so on… Mary demonstrates to us that following Christ need not involve grand gestures, or even highly philosophical and theological deliberation, but is sometimes accomplished through our quietly trusting in God’s plan, living out of His Gospel and so doing His will whether as young people like Mary at the Annunciation or older people like Mary at her Assumption.

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a firm promise of salvation for all flesh that yearns for redemption and conforms itself to God’s will. The Resurrection of the Dead which Christians profess means our total renewal: not simply more of the same, an extension of our use-by date, the postponement of wrinkles… For that would mean we remain children of the first Eve, forever fragile and obsessively postponing the effects of our bondage to decay. No: the Resurrection of the Dead and assumption of our earthly natures into heavenly life, which we profess, means our total revitalisation, body and soul, and the promise, that should we live this bodily life with the faith and love as Mary did, we will join her in that yet more glorious life with Christ and all His saints.

O Blessed Virgin Mary, assumed into heaven body and soul, pray for us!

Thank you all for your kind welcome tonight and especially for hosting me once again at this annual Visitor’s Mass and Dinner. I’m pleased to know St. John’s as an important a part of Catholic and university life here in Sydney today, as it was in the days of predecessors Polding, Vaughan and the others, and as it was in my days as a student at Sydney Uni in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

In the sphere of music, the fugue has famously been described as ‘a piece of music in which one by one the voices come in and the audience goes out’; in the sphere of rhetoric, the after-dinner speech has sometimes been defined as ‘a speech in which the point gradually drifts in and the audience drifts off’! I shall try, therefore, to keep this brief.

It’s often said that art imitates life but that eventually life imitates art. Paul Griffiths, the CEO of Dubai Airport, an airport most of us had never heard of, let alone visited, a decade or two ago but now the busiest airport in the world for international passenger traffic, handling over 80 million passengers per year. You might think the head honcho of such an operation would have no time for anything else. Yet Paul Griffiths is also an organist, holding a licentiate from the Royal Academy of Music, regularly accompanying choirs, and giving recitals in the great cathedrals and halls of the world. Only last Sunday he performed an organ suite by French composer Maurice Duruflé at Westminster Abbey. In an interview with Classic FM, Griffiths admitted that many are surprised that he has a day job as CEO of the world’s busiest airport yet is a proficient musician as well; but he insists there are important parallels between music and business. Both involve complex relationships with others, command of technical aspects, judging the mood of the stakeholders, interpreting the score, and sheer hard slog…

Music encourages us to see beneath the surface-level differences and understand the one human nature that connects us all. By its very intangibility, and by its ability to transcend time, place, history and culture, music goes straight to our core and challenges us to live not only for ourselves-that is, play not only for our own joys and sorrows-but to live for others, to see in them the same emotions, the same joys and sorrows, that we find in ourselves, and to think about how our musical expression connects or fails to connect with them. In our Gospel passage tonight Mary didn’t just think to herself just how wonderful God was, she didn’t just tell cousin Elizabeth, no: she composed the first Christian hymn, the Magnificat, and sang it with gusto. Like her, we are each of us composers of our own lives, and by our relationships, interpretation and technique express ourselves to the world. But that music can be an epic symphony, a lyric opera, a head-banging punk, mundane lift music. The Church is still singing Mary’s Magnificat, every night of the year, all over the world; it has been set thousands of times and by practically every great composer; it continues to inspire and uplift as does her life-story that it celebrates.

My little thought for you tonight is: just as we tell people in their HSC year that ATARs aren’t everything, that a year from now no-one will even care, that they are at best helpful for getting into the next thing, so, dare I say, are your university years. Of course, I don’t want to diminish your efforts or the importance of your studies: the Church whose College this is wants the best to graduate from it. But in the end what will matter more is the symphony you write with your life and so the melodies you are developing even now. Ask the big questions, contemplate what are and will be your ideals, cultivate your character and your relationship with God, read furiously and debate respectfully, experiment and deliberate, beyond the next assessment task, so that when that day comes for you to speak of ‘my time at St. John’s’ you will think of the days in which your developed the craft of composing a good life, the wisdom that will inform its lyrics, the motifs that will be your music and its variations. God bless the symphony orchestra and philharmonic choir that is St. John’s! God bless you all!