The Assumption
About the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Dr. Tom Neal writes:
This immense Feast is the pledge of our own future bodily resurrection, a bold testament to the dignity of our body as integral to our identity. Contra popular language, your body is not just a ‘shell’ that you inhabit but will one day be gladly liberated from. Rather, it is sin that tears your body and soul apart at death, and only the saving power of an enfleshed God can reunite them into the unity that God himself established in the beginning. My soul is not “inside” my body, but I am an ensouled body and an embodied soul. As St. Thomas Aquinas famously said of the disembodied soul, “The soul is not I.”
Become aware of your body as you read this. The majesty! The mystery of the unity that you are! You, as priest of nature, join in yourself matter and spirit as a temple of ineffable dignity that, for those in friendship with God, also bears within the fullness of Trinitarian divinity. And though your body may be broken or infirm, weak and fragile, it is of infinite value in God’s sight.
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