The Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary - 15th August 2025
Today we come to the celebration of our patronal festival, a day to celebrate the passing over of the Blessed Virgin Mary into the life of eternity.
As I write my festal reflections through the year it seems to me that we have rather a lot of patron saints, each one bringing something different to us as we celebrate them in turn. Last month we celebrated St Benedict who gave us our Rule of life and links us to a wide family of Benedictine nuns, monks and oblates. We then celebrated St Mary Magdalen, whose feast day was chosen as the day for the consecration of the first two sisters of the Community of the Holy Comforter, from whom our own community evolved. I’ve been told that they would have chosen that day because Mary Magdalen was seen as the saint for ‘fallen women’, the women who had got into difficulties whom our forebears sought to help. For us it is a day for celebrating the courage of those sisters who wanted to serve God in a form of life that was not yet acknowledged by the Church of England and was viewed with suspicion by many.
Back in March we celebrated Blessed Gundulf who founded this monastery and provides us with a link to our diocesan cathedral in Rochester. For good measure we also celebrated St Benedict in March as he gets two feast days! And perhaps I should add the anniversary of the dedication of our Church of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, a day for giving thanks for the beautiful space within which we worship. So a rich variety of opportunities to celebrate aspects of our life and history.
In the cycle of the church’s year this feast of St Mary, who gives her name to our Abbey, is the last of this succession of patronal festivals. Maybe we should see it as the culmination that brings all the variety into focus. But what might that focus be? In looking to her we reach back to the source of our salvation, the origin of the faith which we share with all our patron saints. Those who have felt called to a live dedicated to prayer take particular inspiration from her, especially communities of nuns. I imagine that might have been a reason for choosing her as the patron of Gundulf’s community of nuns.
In our collect for this feast we sing of our desire to follow her example of ‘humility and singleness of heart’. She exemplifies the one thing necessary, a heart that is ‘single’ and open to the coming of God, and embodied in a humility that grasps at nothing for herself. ‘Singleness of heart’ is not a phrase you hear much, we are more likely to talk about being ‘single-minded’. It is a virtue we embrace if we really want to achieve something, a single-minded pursuit of excellence of some kind. A single-minded pursuit of God may have been what brought us here. It speaks of a tight focus on getting a clear understanding of God’s ways and ‘doing it right’. We are determined to ‘get there’ and will expend all our efforts to do so.
But I sense that the single-hearted way of Mary is something different. Her ‘single heart’ is a heart that is spacious and open to what comes, not tightly focussed and determined. Mary did not need to understand intellectually what was happening, she didn’t ask the angel to wait whilst she worked out a systematic theological framework. She did have a very understandable question about how she could bear a child as a virgin – not that the answer really explained anything except that God would do it. She simply had to be open to the incomprehensible and surrender willingly to the incarnation of God in her womb. From then on her life was one of repeated surrender – like any mother she had to surrender to the process of pregnancy and childbirth and the gradual letting go of her child into adult life. But as the mother of God she also had to surrender to the particular pain of watching her son following his path to a violent and unjust death.
Now today we celebrate her death, her ultimate surrender to the end of her earthly life as she passed over into the new life opened up by the death and resurrection of her son. It is a call to surrender that we all must face. Our monastic path asks us to hold death before our eyes every day, to accept our physical mortality and the inevitable decline that leads to death sooner or later. But there are also all the little deaths that we must embrace as we seek to live in love with one another and with the reality of our circumstances. Our daily dying to self brings the life of eternity to birth in us here and now and prepares us for our ultimate surrender to the death of our bodies and the passing over into new life.
With Mary let us rejoice in the gift of eternal life that is ours now and forever, through the life, death and resurrection of her son.
Mother Anne - 15th August 2025