Got angels?

"There were a bunch of people right around there helping everyone. Angels is what I call them."

- Jaime Winegar, a Houston woman who was on the Interstate I-35 Bridge in Minneapolis when it collapsed into the Mississippi River.

Angels...

In a post on the Assumption I wondered if a woman I visited just before she died might have been seeing angels around her bed...

Here's what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say about angels.

The angels Jaime Winegar spoke of were corporeal, not pure spiritual beings, but in a real sense angels nonetheless: messengers of God's presence, love, touch and deliverance.

Where have you seen angels?

Where are the angels in our life?

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...

Assumption Holy Day

(For a better view of this work's beauty,
click on the image.)

Assumption of the Virgin
by Egid Quirin Asam 1725, marble and stucco
Pilgrimage-church, Rohr, Bavaria

Wednesday of this week (August 15) is the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven.

The scriptures we'll be hearing both on Tuesday night at the 7:00 p.m. Vigil Mass and on Wednesday morning at the 9:00 a.m. Ascension day Mass are these. Mass will also be celebrated on Wednesday at 7:00 a.m. in the chapel and the readings for that liturgy can be found here. To understand the first reading (at all three Masses), you might want to skip back to my post of August 2 for some background on the ark of the covenant. Reading the scriptures ahead of time is a great time to prepare for Mass.

(August 15 is also the wedding anniversary of my sister and brother-in-law. Every year my sister and I have a little contest to see if I will remember her wedding anniversary and if she will remember my ordination anniversary. Looks like I'm going to remember - as she did on May 19!)