I think I shocked a good pious aunt of mine when as a schoolboy I told her that the feast of the Assumption was not very important as we did not get a day off school for it. Little sign of a future as editor of The Sacred Heart Messenger there, I fear. I was in the novitiate when Pope Pius XII declared the Assumption of Our Lady a doctrine of the Church, and I was impressed that it might have been the first time a Pope invoked infallibility to make the declaration. It would be some years before I walked into the wonder of that great mystery. I literally walked out of a dark side street in Venice and walked into the Franciscan Church and saw Titian’s famous painting of the Assumption of the Virgin. Nothing had prepared me for the wonder of that painting. It is the largest painting Titian ever painted and it took him two years to paint it. Executed on a grand scale rarely seen before, since 1518 it hangs over the high altar of the church.
With its original conception, and vivid with colour and movement it draws the eyes and minds and souls of those who look at it into the whole mystery of our salvation. At the bottom of the picture are a group of apostles in darkened colours and with outstretched arms, distressed at her departure. At the very top God the Father awaits with outstretched arms to greet Mary; but it is Mary, dressed in vibrant red and borne on a cloud by excited angels, who soars into a golden background. Joyfully she seems just about to step into paradise. Quite appropriately she is the first installment of the rest of the human race who will follow Christ, her son, into heaven. Maybe it was this sense that we all are beginning to share in her assumption that drew me into the story of the painting. The words said when a of water is added to the wine in the chalice at Mass come to mind, ‘may we come to share in his divinity who humbled himself to share in our humanity’. And what a difference faith makes, for in this painting the afterlife is no pale, wan, colourless thing, but full of life and glorious colour. It is no thing of sadness and loss but full of joy and warm acceptance.
Viewing another Titian in the Jesuit church, The Martyrdom of St Lawrence, failed to inspire me. Maybe that was because it is covered with the grime of centuries, and the glory that is underneath is hidden. Just as for most of our lives we cannot glimpse the glory that God plans for those who love him.