The Birthday of Jesus' Mother, Mary

Kathleen Battle and Christopher Parkening Performing Live at the 1987 Grammy Awards: Bach-Gounod Ave Maria

Do you know the date of Mary's birthday?

Take a minute or two to figure that out before reading on...


Not sure? Well, you can figure it out from the church calendar. You know the day when we celebrate Mary's Immaculate Conception - December 8. Now, just count 9 months across the calendar and you’ll land on Mary's birthday - September 8 which this year falls on a Saturday.

Just the next day, September 9, two of our music ministers, Lauren Sprague (soprano) and Carol Messina (piano) will present a concert in honor of the Blessed Mother's birthday. Lauren is one of our cantors and Carol one of our accompanists. The program they have prepared presents a variety of pieces written for and inspired by Mary including: a 9th century chant setting of the Annunciation; a piece entitled “Mary Alone,” written from the perspective of a mother whose son has been killed in war; a contemporary song, “Breath of Heaven” in which Mary sings of her concerns about becoming a mother; as well as a number of musical settings of the Ave Maria prayer by lesser known composers and, of course, the two most familiar settings (Schubert and Bach/Gounod). The repertoire is quite diverse and offers something for everyone.

We will sing Evening Prayer at 7:00 p.m. and the will follow, around 7:30 p.m. There is no admission fee, but all free will offerings will benefit Rosie’s Place, a sanctuary for poor and homeless women in Boston.

Each day between now and the concert, I will post a different rendition of the Ave Maria, with a reminder about the upcoming concert date.

Ave Maria Numbered Series

The Assumption of Bertha Huber

(For a slightly larger version, click on the graphic above.)

If this painting offends, please accept my apology. I post it here not out of any irreverence or even playfulness but rather because the feast of the real Assumption is upon us and, as on all feasts of the Blessed Virgin, we need to discover how what happened in her life and love for God relates to our own. From the website of the painter, Marcia Sandmeyer Wilson:

"This 16x20 oil painting is called The Assumption of Bertha Huber. It is the third version I have done of this theme. Miss Huber was godmother to my three children. She died at age 87 in August, 1975 and I told the children I would paint what it 'really' looked like.

"Miss Huber was from Munich so I know she was expecting nice blond angels waiting for her in heaven... (I)n the first version I also had little pug dog angels because Miss Huber was very fond of our dogs.

"At the bottom of the painting is supposed to be me and the three children weeping for her at the nursing home where she had expired just moments before our arrival. It was a very good nursing home, by the way, named Calvary, in the Bronx."

Painting in the folk art style, Wilson has given us a kind of folk art appreciation of the Assumption. The word comes from the Latin assumere which means to take to one's self. Assumption celebrates the Lord's taking to himself his beloved Mother, the Mother of us all, who, the Church has taught from early times, was assumed into heaven body and soul lest the body which bore the Christ into the world should undergo any corruption.

We pray that one day the Lord will take us to himself at the time of our passing from this life to life forever with God: one day the hands reaching down in Wilson's painting will reach out for you and me. No, we will not be assumed body and soul: this mortal coil of ours will undergo the inevitable corruption of nature. Yet one day the Lord will waken each of us to glory and our souls will be reunited with our bodies in a glorified state, the beauty of which we cannot yet imagine.

So Wilson and her daughters worked at imagining what it really looked like when Bertha Huber made the journey each of us will make.

Just this weekend I was called to visit and pray with a woman who was dying. Margaret was only a few weeks shy of her 103rd birthday! I saw her only hours before her death and yet she was as sharp as a tack, greeting me by name, thanking me for coming to see her, and joining wholeheartedly in the prayers I offered with her and for her.

But there were moments when Margaret seemed distracted from our conversation, straining to see something above her I could not see. And several times she turned her head, as if to listen more closely to a voice I could not hear... I do not know, but I would not be surprised if this beautiful woman was attending to the faces and the voices of angels, or perhaps of the Lord himself, as he prepared to take her to himself...