The Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary - 15th August 2026
The Virgin of the Sign: icon painted at Malling Abbey
At this feast of the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother of God, we celebrate the fulfilment of her life as she passes over into the glory of her son. As we ponder her life we are face to face with the mystery of God’s choosing of her, and the mystery of our being chosen too. What is our particular place in the drama of the cosmos?
In these thoughts I am groping towards something I want to say but can’t get hold of. And maybe that’s the best place to be concerning the things of God! But anyway I hope that there might be something here that speaks to you too…
In the beginning God spoke the universe into existence, somehow all things are carried on the breath of God. Many mystics say that the universe is permeated with God’s energies, that God is not distant but rather intimately involved in sustaining all that is. In a mysterious way God is both totally involved but also utterly transcendent. Is modern science saying the same thing in a different way? Scientists explain that after the ‘big bang’ energy gradually condensed into tangible matter – galaxies, stars, planets, our earth. They say that matter and energy are constantly interchanging, that the universe is a dynamic web of energy and matter.
Helen Luke, in her insightful book ‘Old Age’1, tells us that the root of the word ‘mercy’ is an Etruscan word ‘merc’ which also gives rise to words like ‘merchant’, ‘mercantile’ and ‘commerce’. Mercy is about exchange, about commerce with God rather than just ‘pity’ or ‘forgiveness’. Cynthia Bourgeault takes this in an interesting direction which I can’t quite grasp but feels tantalisingly fruitful. Her intuition is that the constant exchange of matter and energy of which cosmologists speak is actually an expression of God’s mercy and that the field within which we exist is an energy field of mercy, ‘The Mercy’ (capital T capital M) as she likes to say. She says that we swim in The Mercy like a fish in water, and because we are totally immersed we are unaware of it in our normal daily lives2.
But God desires to have ‘commerce’ with his universe, for the universe to come into consciousness of The Mercy, to come into relationship with him. The stories passed down to us in the Bible tell of gradual dawning of awareness of the God who is utterly transcendent yet loves us and communicates with us. Not just a tribal deity but the creator and sustainer of all things who in his mercy seeks us out. He found particular response in the people of Israel, culminating in Mary’s ‘yes’ that enabled God to become incarnate in the man Jesus. It was a ‘yes’ with cosmic implications, God’s energies focused down into that one man whilst at the same time remaining the field within which all things are held.
In the Prologue to John’s gospel we read ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.’ And later in that same gospel Jesus says ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.’ The energy that sustains all things can be seen in Jesus, and it has been made manifest in his life of self-giving love. Many people in his time did not see this and went about their lives oblivious of the wonder in their midst.
Yet there were some who were ‘chosen’, who did come to see, even if only dimly, the mystery of God’s love shown forth in Jesus. The choosing was God’s initiative but it also required their own response, a willingness to set aside the lives they had been living to follow him. Maybe all are chosen but only some are able to respond? It is a mystery.
I don’t know if you ever ponder the strangeness of how we have ended up together in this place, doing what we do? There is something that calls us here that is hard to explain and which does not grab other people in the same way. We have a compulsion to respond in a special way to the mercy within which we swim, even if we can barely comprehend what it is all about.
Today we celebrate that apparently ordinary woman, Mary, who in her incomprehension still said ‘yes’ to God and so opened her womb to receive the energies of the entire cosmos focussed down into a tiny foetus, God incarnate. Like her, may we be willing to open ourselves to God’s mercy and to play our part in manifesting God’s love to the cosmos.
Mother Anne - 15th August 2026
1“Old Age: Journey into Simplicity” by Helen M. Luke
2"Mystical Hope: Trusting in the Mercy of God" by Cynthia Bourgeault