Assumptions and the Assumption

August 15, 7:30 a.m. or so, nearly fifty years ago. My sister and I were awakened by our father, who was bursting with news. Mom, who suffered through a long, hot summer (with an average daily high in July of 89 degrees) of pregnancy, had just given birth to not one but two babies, a boy and a girl. “I knew it,” Dad crowed to the two of us and anyone else who might be within a block or five of our home. “She was bigger’n a house.”

So what else were an eight-year-old and a five-year-old to do but run to our neighbors’ houses to share the exciting news? The second stop was the Kunkels, a family with four kids, a family that like us was Catholic but was decidedly more devout. Mrs. Kunkel was changing sheets when the six of us charged upstairs. “Oh, how wonderful this happened on a holy day,” she said. My sister and I must have looked dumbfounded, because then she went on. “Assumption Day, the day Mary was assumed into heaven.” That didn’t help much either.At some point that day, I asked someone to explain the Assumption to me, since I apparently had been absent the day it was covered in catechism class. It meant that unlike the rest of us, when Mary’s time was up, she went to heaven in her earthly body, not just her soul.

Perhaps it was the excitement and surprise of that August 15, two babies where everyone, including the doctor, thought we’d have a new brother or sister but not both. But I’ve never much questioned my Church’s dogma on Mary’s Assumption, or the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth for that matter. For if God could provide a surprise like twins (or, years later, when my sister who was born that day would give birth to twins she was told would be boys, only to have a daughter and son herself), who I am to question what else He could do?