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Some seventy nine years ago at eleven o’clock in the morning, the second nuclear bomb detonated directly above the Catholic cathedral in Nagasaki, Japan. A week later, August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption, the Pacific war ended. It was also the day my maternal grandfather died.
The second world war had raged for six years, and the conflict had claimed millions of lives. In Russia alone 20 million had perished. Thirty thousand had died in Britain during the constant German air raids. Dresden had been fire bombed; six million Jews, Gypsies and others considered outsiders died in the concentration camps. The mud of the Kokoda track swallowed Australian troops as they tried to stem the Japanese advance on Port Moresby. The world seemed aflame with conflict… Perhaps the nuclear bomb is a symbol of just how destructive the human race had become.
Had everyone gone mad?
And yet, and yet… the warring parties came to their senses and peace ‘broke out’ and there was jubilation in the streets. Human dignity could take the painful crawl back from the brink of despair and self-destruction.
The long memory of the church would proclaim in the years following the war what it had always harboured in its heart … that the charred cinders of Nagasaki and a thousand other battlefields are not our destiny. In making The Assumption of Mary an article of faith, we are assured of our dignity as children of God with the promise of eternal life. It is a profound doctrine because it iterates the central mystery of Christianity: the paradox of the cross – that death is not the end, that destruction and death are not the ultimate reality. Jesus has shown us this new reality by his own death and resurrection… he has flicked the coin… titled the mirror… and we see another side, another image. It is the image of life beyond the grave, a life that Mary also now enjoys. It is the model we will follow.
Wrapped in the power of this revelation, I look forward to meeting my grandfather one day.
