This was in the paper recently: "Romantics seeking to live happily ever after can now design their own ultimate Disney story-book wedding at Walt Disney World. The hotel is arranging all-inclusive weddings with themed balls, glass coach rides, a ceremony with a castle back-drop, Disney characters at the reception, Alice-in-wonderland bridesmaid teas, and Pleasure Island pre-wedding parties. If live action themes are not magical enough, couples can choose a wedding based on Cinderella, Fantasia, Beauty and the Beast."

So the travel section. Very nice. Americans and others go on pilgrimage as did our fathers before us. And they go to Disneyland, Disneyworld. Appropriately enough. It is a kind of cult of the mouse. And fitting that couples seek to be married there. A Disneyland memorial cemetery cannot be far off.

There is more pathos in this than humor. An effort to express something out of their world to give character to a human experience is old and valid. To be reduced by a faithless culture to doing so by nothing better than a fairy tale can only be the ultimate sadness.

For the fairy tale was meant to be a bridge to the land of faith. By dint of imaginative story-telling involving the fantastic and the unreal, one is prepared to move beyond simple reason and reliance on rationality to the world of faith in the ostensibly unbelievable. And fairy tales for all their out-of-this-world character, always convey  a message, a lesson, and often enough a hard lesson, a bitter truth. The happy ending is not characteristic. Dealing with darkness and evil is. So the preparation is sound.

For we deal today with a truth for which we might be well prepared through a childhood enriched by a full experience of fairy tales.

The Cistercian Order, this house and all monasteries of the Order are dedicated to the Holy Mother of God. Specifically, the high altar of this church is dedicated to her Assumption which we celebrate today.

The Assumption is a teaching that goes back to our roots as believers, even if it was precisely declared only in our own times. Just as this church being officially a basilica ties us to the most ancient churches of Christendom and so declares emphatically where we come from, what our roots are, so we believe in the Assumption because we are Catholic, not because it was declared dogma in 1950 by Pius XII. We are nothing if not historical.

And we can understand the fact only if we see it in context, that is, the wholeness of the mystery of Christ. Central to this day, just as the Mass is central to our celebration of it, is the passion/death/rising of Jesus Christ.

And Jesus is ours by way of a woman. The woman's name is Mary. By virtue of what she was called to be, she was conceived without sin. That is Part I. Part II is that she conceived of the Holy Spirit and became by the fact mother of Jesus Christ, Son of God. Part III is that Christ was born of her nine months later in the Nativity of God on earth. Part IV and the climax is her Assumption into Heaven which is our joy to celebrate today. They are all of a piece, all parts of a whole that necessarily go together. They are all essential.

And they have a fairy tale quality. That is, are in some ways incredible. In other ways, essential to the faith story.

When we move into the world of faith, we are at once fundamentally historical — we deal with facts — and essentially transcendental. That is the fairy tale quality.

If we see Christ and His passion/death/rising as this focus, we can see Mary as the first great ring of glory around the Godhead. And the four moons of that glorious rainbow are her conception, her conceiving, her giving birth and her joyous Assumption. These mysteries are resplendent in the glory of God and after them follow the unending banks of the redeemed, stretching into the infinite, bright with God's splendor. "Eye has not seen, ear not heard..."

One would need more than a human imagination to picture Heaven. Yet in faith we can get some notion of what is to come. All of it began here on earth, in time. All the people are real. They live. All the events are historical, they happened. If all surpasses any fairy tale in splendor, all surpasses fairy tales for being history.

As a people of God we are wed to the Lord in undying love. We will one day be with Him, body and soul. The Mother of Christ, and so our mother, is already there, promise and guarantee of the fact. For which God be praised.  Amen