Celebrating the Feast of the Assumption

Yesterday, of course, was the great Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, when Catholics celebrate the honor extended to Mary of having both soul and body taken into heaven at once at the moment of her death, in prefiguration of what will happen for all of us on the Last Day. In all her feasts, Mary is the emblem of God's promises, not only to herself, but to all of us through Christ, of life and joy not only for our souls, but for our bodies as well.

On Thursday at noon the children and I went to the Latin Mass at our new parish church. Even then Father was preaching about the Assumption, some readings and responses for which were part of that Mass, even though it wasn't the Vigil yet, but only a noonday Mass. People think of the Church, particularly in the old days of the Latin Mass, as so solemn and serious, he said, and yet she loves her celebrations so much that she can't wait for the feast day to begin celebrating -- she's got to begin the day before. At both that Mass and the feast-day Mass yesterday, he preached winsomely on the way this feast celebrates the body as well as the soul, ending with a story about visiting St. Teresa's convent in Avila. He and several others had been conversing for a long time with the Mother Superior through a grille -- they couldn't see her; she was simply a sweet angelic voice speaking with them. Before that they had spent a long time praying in the church, and as the conversation began to wind up, Father said, "Mother, I hate to interrupt this beautiful conversation with a question like this, but . . . where are the restrooms?" To which she responded, laughing, "Oh, Father, you know we're not angels, we have bodies . . . "

So yesterday we celebrated first by going to Mass -- afterwards Helier regaled Father with possibly more Star Wars information than Father was really looking for at ten in the morning -- and then the day was expended in dinner-making. We'd invited a colleague of Aelred's, the other new theology hire at the college, to eat with us; it's good to invite guests for feast days, we find, because it makes us go to greater lengths to be festive, and to PLAN to be festive, instead of saying at four in the afternoon, "Well, looks like celebratory scrambled eggs for dinner." This dinner was also the inauguration of our new dining-room table, which is long and narrow and looks like an English college refectory table -- we could seat twelve easily and fourteen, probably, if we put someone at each end and scrunched a little in the middle. It doesn't have leaves or anything: it's just a long table, taking up most of the length of the dining room. I don't have a tablecloth long enough for it, and beforehand I worried a little that any dinner at this table was going to feel like an administrative board meeting, or "Mrs. Nixon is finished."

I shouldn't have worried. It was perfect. I laid the table with a gold tablecloth, then a white lace one over that, and left the ends bare. We own, currently, three Queen Anne dining-room chairs, thanks to the dear Father back home who gave us so much furniture, but we put all the kitchen chairs up and down both sides of the table, and it worked. Nobody sat at the ends, which was maybe a little confusing but made things cozier overall. The dimmer switch for the dining-room chandelier has ceased to work, so that you can have either darkness or all-out blinding whiteness, nothing in between. We opted for dark-with-candles, and it was very atmospheric.

The menu was roast chicken, marinated in olive oil, honey, dijon mustard, and a dash of balsamic vinegar; saffron risotto, of which there wasn't much because I had a lot less rice than I had thought, so I made pasta, too, with fresh basil; tossed green salad, as they say in restaurants; a quick bread that I made which turned out like a yeast bread: self-rising flour, wheat germ, rice flour, honey, egg and buttermilk, and I painted the loaf all over with beaten egg, so it baked up all crusty and shiny; and to go with the bread Crispina and I made honey-lavender butter. This was simple: we took out a stick of butter to soften a bit while we picked and washed some lavender, then we creamed the butter and honey together (don't ask me for measurements, because I don't measure -- a stick of butter, enough honey, and enough but not too much lavender) and chopped the lavender in in little bits and stirred it all together. I scraped the mixture into a little silver baby porringer I happened to have hanging around and put it in the fridge to chill, and it was delicious on the bread. I'd read that it's traditional to bless herbs on the Feast of the Assumption -- we also had bunches of lavender, rosemary and lemon balm in old blue glass bottles on the table, instead of flowers. So what with one thing and another it was a fragrant meal. Epiphany made a peach cobbler for dessert, and that also was fragrant and delicious.

I wish I could post pictures -- a generous benefactor has supplied me with a new digital camera, but I haven't yet worked out how to upload photos from it. So you'll just have to keep taking my word for things for a while. Blessed are they who have not seen and yet believe.