Maria Assumpta est...

Happy Feast Day all readers! Today is the Feast of Our Lady's Assumption into Heavenly glory, where after her brief (it had to be) sojourn on earth after her Divine Son's Ascension, she was received body and soul and with great rejoicing into Heaven. I would like to write a longer post, but alas, I have to leave for my depressing job momentarily. I am only glad that the computer was free when I got in from Mass!

As for feeling depressed or grieved, well a few words from Cardinal Newman might assuage that:

''She will comfort you in your discouragements, solace you in your fatigues, raise you after your falls, reward you for your successes. She will show you her Son, your God and your all. When the spirit within you is excited, or relaxed, or depressed, when it loses its balance, when it is restless and wayward, when it is sick of what it has, and hankers after what it has not, when your eye is solicited with evil and your mortal frame trembles under the shadow of the tempter, what will bring you to yourselves, to peace and to health, but the cool breath of the Immaculate and the fragrance of the Rose of Sharon? It is the boast of the Catholic Religion, that it has the gift of making the young heart chaste; and why is this, but that it gives us Jesus Christ for our food, and Mary for our nursing Mother? Fulfill this boast in yourselves; prove to the world that you are following no false teaching, vindicate the glory of your Mother Mary, whom the world blasphemes, in the very face of the world, by the simplicity of your own deportment, and the sanctity of your words and deeds. Go to her for the royal heart of innocence. She is the beautiful gift of God, which outshines the fascinations of a bad world, and which no one ever sought in sincerity and was disappointed.'' (John Henry Newman, On the Fitness of the Glories of Mary, this sermon was in the first volume of Newman's Catholic sermons, preached and published in 1849.)

Mater Maria, pro nobis Christum exora.