Our great feastday of hope.

Today we celebrate (one day early) the Assumption of Our Lady body and soul into heaven - the masterpiece of God's plan for Creation. Mary, the sinless one, has co-operated perfectly with the Word, her son. She is taken up to share the life of God in glory and she becomes our hope. We look to her assumption as we long for the first flower that bursts through the barren earth in Spring.

Everyone is feverishly analysing the riots in our major cities: lack of personal value-systems; no respect for authority; poor parenting etc. Certainly there are very  many young people who seem to have so little hope beyond aspiring to a few filched flat-screen TVs. This is surely a fruit of a secular, materialistic culture with no true grasp of what we are as human beings.

Two weeks ago, several hundred people in their teens and twenties travelled for the 5-day Summer Session at Woldingham (see below). They were filled with a whole-hearted love for their Catholic faith and want to live according to the highest values. They were brimming with hope. To witness them all singing the Salve Regina to Our Lady each evening would surely surprise the loudest New Atheist in the media.

St Maximilian Kolbe, the martyr-priest of Auschwitz whose feast-day is really today, made it his personal mission to make Mary known and loved throughout the world of the twentieth century. He saw the rise of dark forces -  hatred for the Church and Naziism. Through his extraordinary final act of love he had the last word on them all. He showed the power of Our Lady in our lives. She opens the door to hope, to her Son, in our lives.

The atheist way can be seen to have failed in so many ways. Human beings are made for more than flat-screen TVs. We are made, as Mary shows us most beautifully, for something far beyond this world. We are made for the life of God.