Notre Dame de Broome

Last year I went on pilgrimage in France. Many churches I entered were called Notre Dame (Our Lady) de ……. . Although I had known this for a long time, I sniffed a bit too much of a concentration on the person of Mary rather than Jesus.  At the end of my pilgrimage I stayed at a place called Notre Dame de l'Hermitage, the mother house of the Marist Brothers. It was here that l discovered what it was all about.

This is how it goes.

Our faith is incarnational, in other words, it demonstrates its meaning in ways that are accessible to you and me in all our humanness. This does not mean that we understand it all, for any person who thinks that they understand everything there is to know about God, the world and themselves is a delusional fool.

The key to our faith is relationship we have with God and each other.  

If God is our Father and Jesus is God's Son, what do we call Jesus? (brother).

If Jesus is our brother, what do we call Mary? (mother)

Mary ran the home and looked after Jesus, she guided him and looked after him. Remember, Jesus was God, but he was fully human and needed all that a mother could share with him. Mary will share with us as well if we allow her space.

What I learned from the Marist Brothers was that if we want to be close to Jesus, we need to recreate Mary's house to meet & be like Jesus.  So the French started by naming everything they could after Mary. At Notre Dame de l’Hermitage, one of the brothers told me: ‘This is Mary’s house, and we are living in it to become close to Jesus.’ Naming their houses after Mary indicated their wish.

So we are here at St Mary’s College, named after the mother of God, whom we follow to become close to Jesus. Today we not only recognise that fact but celebrate that as God’s mother, as the mother of Jesus, she was drawn into the life of God so completely that at the end of her life she was taken, body and soul, into heaven. The other day someone said to me: “That isn’t in the Bible, so it can’t be true.” The Bible is the word of God, but not everything that is important is contained within its pages. God left us to work some things out ourselves, and the Assumption was one of those worked out very early in the life of the Church. We are bounded and confounded by time! Mary has gone ahead of us and is drawn into the life of the Godhead.

We need to remind ourselves of God in our lives constantly. One great way is to interrupt our day with prayer. This term we have had quiet time at 12noon and soon we will pray the Angelus in that time.  The Angelus reminds us that God became one of us so that we could be raised up to be like God. Mary leads us in this as the first to enter the kingdom of heaven.

I would like to finish with prayer of Pope Francis that he gives us in his first letter to the whole Church, called Lumen Fidei

Let us turn in prayer to Mary, Mother of the Church and Mother of our faith.

Mother, help our faith!

Open our ears to hear God’s word and to recognize his voice and call.

Awaken in us a desire to follow in his footsteps, 

to go forth from our own land and to receive his promise.

Help us to be touched by his love, that we may touch him in faith.

Help us to entrust ourselves fully to him and to believe in his love, 

especially at times of trial, beneath the shadow of the cross, 

when our faith is called to mature.

Sow in our faith the joy of the Risen One.

Remind us that those who believe are never alone.

Teach us to see all things with the eyes of Jesus, that he may be light for our path. 

And may this light of faith always increase in us, 

until the dawn of that undying day which is Christ himself, your Son, our Lord!

Homily on the Feast of the Assumption, 15th August 2013, St Mary's College, Broome, WA.