The Grace of August

Aug 12

August has been described as a slow month. Business leaders see it as a period of decreased activity and reduced sales. Some call these lazy, hazy days a “weak” time of year where work is suspended, and decisions are put on hold. Author Victoria Erickson called August “the slow, gentle month that stretches out across the span of the year. It yawns and lingers on.” It is as if Father Time takes a vacation before the world starts up again in September.

History shows a different side of this penultimate summer month. Its reputation for being quiet, slow, and peaceful is betrayed by the facts of the last century. While the “Great War” officially began in July of 1914, the fighting and casualties really ramped up in August. Author Barbara Tuchman wrote about this first month of the war in her best-seller: “The Guns of August” (1962).

Almost thirty years later, the guns were destroying a new generation. August continued to be a period of pain, suffering, and death for millions of people as nations became entangled in the Second World War. The martyrdom of St. Maximilian Kolbe (1941) and St. Edith Stein (1942) in Auschwitz occurred in the eighth month. In August 1943, eleven Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth were executed by the Gestapo in Poland. The war only came to an end when two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan in August 1945, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of people.

Even amidst the hatred and carnage of the first fifty years of the twentieth century, death did not have the last word. The second half of the century began with a sign of great hope - the declaration of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary as a dogma of the Church. Theologians and historians see this announcement as a direct response to the death and despair that much of the world experienced after the war.

The Assumption emphasized the dignity of the human body, the promise of the resurrection, and the sanctity of all human life. The horrors of war, the atrocities of the Holocaust, and the devastation of atomic weapons were still being felt by most people when Pope Pius XII told modern society that, like Mary, our lives and our world can be filled with grace.

As we celebrate the Assumption, we pray that guns and war will give way to the “grace of August.” St. Francis de Sales would agree. He taught that human nature is fundamentally good. Though our world is deeply divided and impacted by sin, it can be redeemed and transformed by the power of God's grace and a sincere desire to live a devout life.

May this great feast and these final weeks of August be reminders of the beauty and goodness of our world and our faith. In the Catholic liturgy for the Assumption, the praise of the nation for the widow Judith are applied to the Virgin Mary: “Thou art the glory of Jerusalem, thou art the joy of Israel, thou art the honor of our people (Judith 15).”

The Assumption is a reminder that we are all called to glory…on earth as it is in heaven.