In many paintings on Ugly Renaissance Babies, Jesus looks like a miniature adult, complete with an adult’s head and six-pack abs, no doubt acquired during his many hours of baby Pilates.
The Holy Spirit "speaks" through the calendar, and this becomes a proclamation of the purest sort: the kind that the "heavens" rather than the Reformed pastors "declare."
On the face of it, Mary’s Assumption, body and soul, into heaven, is one of the most challenging traditions of the Church. One of my seminary professors loved to say that, for him, the Assumption was just too much of an assumption. It certainly presents a unique obstacle to many of our Protestant brethren. And this is in large part because the event does suggest, in a strange way, that the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus wasn’t enough, that there had to be something more.
