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God Is Faithful: A Retreat Guide on Mary’s Assumption Into Heaven
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The Blessed Virgin Mary led a life full of suffering. But she never let that suffering obscure her faith in God. She continued to believe in God and God’s promises, even when King Herod tried to kill the baby Jesus, when the Holy Family had to escape to Egypt, and when Jesus was rejected, condemned and crucified in front of her very eyes.
She always stayed faithful to God, because she knew that God himself is faithful, trustworthy, even though she didn’t always understand everything he was doing.
And at the end of her life, when her mission on earth was finished, her trust in God was abundantly vindicated. God chose to reward her with a very special grace: he assumed her, body and soul, directly into heaven.
God was able to show his faithfulness to her in an extraordinary way, giving her through the Assumption the joy of a special participation in Christ’s resurrection, because she had been faithful to him.
This mysterious and extraordinary expression of mutual faithfulness can instruct and inspire us, if we give it the chance. And that’s exactly what this Retreat Guide, God Is Faithful: A Retreat Guide on Mary’s Assumption into Heaven, will try to do.
- The first meditation will reflect on how Mary’s faithfulness can help guide our own Christian lives.
- The second meditation will explore how Mary’s special experience of God’s faithfulness in her Assumption foreshadows the future experience of the whole Church.
- And in the conference, we will reflect on how great Christian art—so much of which has been inspired by the Blessed Virgin Mary—can feed our souls.
To begin, let’s quiet our souls and turn our attention to the Lord who filled Mary with grace, and let’s ask him to do the same for us, so that we too can experience, more fully than ever that, “God is faithful” (1 Corinthians 1:9).
Introduction
First Meditation
Second Meditation
Conference
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So beautiful, thank you very much, Father John.
Thank you so much father John. Only God knows how have you been His instrument in my path to grow in my faith and to get me closer in this world of spirituality and day to day battle. May our Father in Heavens continue blessing you and protecting you.
Asa new Catholic, I truly resonate with so much of this experiential way of encountering faith and mystery.
I was drawn a long time ago to the Catholic faith through its expression of mystery in external forms- the passion of Christ on the cross, and various images of Mary- all of which were missing and diminished in my Protestant upbringing. Not that Protestant Christianity is without its own deep roots and ways of approaching the Divine, but Art was surface, linear, and one dimensional. Liturgy there was limited to reading and hearing scripture, and singing great hymns- but the senses were seldom engaged. I first felt really drawn to Catholicism through my readings of the Romantic English poets in university, who saw in nature the living presence of a mystery they could not comprehend. The story of John Henry Newman’s conversion to Catholicism, often expressed through the writings of the Romantic poets, really paved my path into he Catholic Church. This retreat has confirmed much of that early and ongoing journey. Thank you.