re mary s assumption i hate to sound flippant having shot off my mouth badly on the net before but i m afraid that much of this material only adds to my feeling that the assumption of mary would be better phrased our assumptions about mary in all the time i ve been reading about mary on this group i can not recall reading much about mary that did not sound like wishful veneration with scant if any scriptural foundation i find in the new testament a very real portrait of christ s parents as compellingly human persons to be honored and admired for their humility and submission to god s working beyond doubt but the almalga mation of theories and dogma that has accreted around them gives me an image of alien and inhuman creatures untouched by sin or human desire only christ himself was so truly sanctified and even he knew temptation albeit without submitting to it i also don t see the necessity of saying the holy parents were some how sanctified beyond normal humanity it sounds like our own inability to grasp the immensity of god s grace in being incarnated through an or dinary human being i won t start yelling about how people are worshipping mary etc since folks have told me otherwise about that but i do think we lose part of the wonder of god s incarnation in christ when we make his parents out to be sinless sexless deathless otherworldly beings paul marxhausen university of nebraska lincoln grace happens
