To You we Send up Our Sighs

After someone dies in Broome, we make a Rosary Novena. Most of you know that the Rosary is a series of prayers during which we meditate on the major events in the life of Jesus, using the Our Father and Hail Mary as the main prayers.  A novena is prayer that is said for nine days straight, so when a person dies in Broome we say the rosary for nine days straight.

One time we made the novena, and night after night many people would gather and pray the rosary.  I kept thinking of the woman we were praying for and wondered how she did it. She had a really hard life, with nothing really going right for her. She always seemed to have problems that she could never solve and I wondered why she had, like so many other Broome people, such a strong faith and a great devotion to Mary. Why, I wondered, could she have such faith and devotion when over her whole life she did not seem to get a break: How did she keep going?  I was sitting praying the novena with everyone else when I heard myself praying the Hail Holy Queen, the prayer at the end of the Rosary. Part of it prays:  to thee do we send 

up our sighs poor banished children of Eve,

to thee do we send up our sighs  mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.  

That is when it hit me.

These women and men saw in Mary someone who they could identify with in their happiness but also in their pain.   The Mother of God we celebrate today is the Mary for whom nothing seemed to go well. Asked by and Angel to do the impossible when she was fourteen years old she almost certainly was the butt of ridicule and jokes of those around her; she always tried to protect her Son who was so very special; and in the end saw her son being tortured and die an horrific death; finally she had her dead Son laid in her arms. When Jesus was young the old woman Anna told here that a sword would pierce her heart, and it did.  

It is enough to make you lose faith in life and the world, and certainly in God.

Mary, however, does not do that, but the opposite. Mary trusts, she believes, she holds all her pain in her heart. In doing so she bore witness to her Son Jesus. She was his first and strongest follower, and if we want to know how to follow Jesus, we need to look at Mary.  Those people I have known in this town know it far better than me, but they have shared their secret. To know Mary is to know Jesus. To walk close to Mary is to be beside Jesus. To trust with Mary, especially when everything is going wrong, is to follow Jesus.  At the end of her life she was lifted up by Jesus to be with him in heaven, body and soul. Because of her faith and trust, because she was so close to God form the beginning of her life, her transition from earth to heaven was seamless, immediate. Mary was and is so ‘full of grace’ that she was immediately with God as she left this life.

Our journey can never be so immediate, so instantaneous as Mary’s, but we can be helped by her journey.  The fourth Glorious Mystery of the Rosary is the Assumption. When I pray that mystery I remember that Mary followed God and he kept the promise he made when the Angel asked her to be the mother of Jesus. God is faithful to us: Mary asks us to be, like her faithful to God.

Next time you pray the Rosary, ask to be faithful like Mary.

Homily, St Mary;s College Broome, Assumption 15th August 2012