This Our Exile.

Our Lady of Coomatloukane, in Co. Kerry, Ireland. 

Today in the Church we celebrate Mary going home. The Assumption is something which I think we all understand deep down, particularly in this day and age, because it is about that longing for home. No matter who you are or what your beliefs are, I think we all understand that longing for home. 

So much of my decision to come to Ireland this summer, beyond the course in Latin that I am taking, was a decision to come home. To trace my family’s roots and hope to understand not just history, but who I am a little bit better. I have had a year in Italy to understand that part of my history and I think I understand myself more in light of that wonderful whirring existence. Here in Ireland too, the more time I spend the more I get why I react to different things in different ways. I have stood in the graveyard where generations of my mom’s family are buried, and I walked the streets that other O’Connors have before me in Abbeyfeale. This weekend I will go to Roscommon and there meet my cousins on my Dad’s side. There was something in this journey about a longing for home, and Ireland, and my family here, have been so incredibly gracious in providing that for me. 

There is a strange feeling though, being in these places which have defined my family, I still feel oddly not at home. This is not to say that I am ungrateful for these experiences, or that I am not content with my life. I very much am content, there have been so many blessings, so many new friends, so much life. Still though, I feel that exile. It definitely has something to do with not being in the United States in 1 year, 1 month, and 2 weeks. Truth be told, though, there was an itchiness to leave the US there to find something more that set me on this path in the first place. If I didn’t already feel the desire to learn something more in this way, I may have never asked to move to Europe. 

Which brings me to my point. In our world today, regardless of how much the internet, the media, and all of that other stuff connects us there are still so many of us that feel disconnected, so many of us looking for home. Today is our feast day. 

Today is our feast day because we can have a belief that there is a home to which we are headed, and that Christ has already opened it to us, because another human being like us is already there. 

Today is our feast because, for as much as the thought of home or talking to someone there is nice we know that it is never replaced by physically being there, as Mary is. 

Today is our feast because we know one of us who went before us, and still advocates for us. 

St. Augustine of Hippo once famously said in his confessions that “Our Hearts are restless until they rest in you oh God.” That’s home, the place where our hearts find rest and our exile is at an end. It would be wrong to make the Assumption a day where we make Mary seem kind-of-almost-like Jesus, but not quite. The fact that Mary is a human being like any of us gives us all hope. The fact that she is assumed to heaven body and soul affirms the goodness of our earthly body, and illustrates what we already know about going home and being physically present. That Mary is conceived without sin and plays such an pivotal  role in the history of salvation is why she goes before us, but in going before us, she is a sign of hope, that someday this exile will end for us too, because it already has for her. 

In 45 days, 22 hours, and 30 minutes I will touch down on an AirIberia flight from Madrid and be home in the US for the first time in well over a year. That exile will end, if only for 10 days. The truth is though that for those ten nights, like every night, I will pray “and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb Jesus,” because even in the city I once waxed romantic over, as the video I am reposting below displays, I still felt enough of that same exile there to keep searching. 

Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth, pray for those of us who here in exile hope to follow you home someday. 

(A true story about this video. I had intended to make something like this anyway, but I definitely made it when I was at my most homesick last summer. I repost it here because I think, despite its overt cheesiness, that it gets at the sense of longing that I am talking about in the post above.)