The Feast of the Assumption

August 15th is a big, big holiday in Italy, called Fer' Agosto, and the start of an exodus of the populations of the bigger cities for seaside resorts where whoever is so fortunate finds a place to spend the next six weeks.  Stores, pharmacies, restaurants (before the days of high tourism), everything imaginable, is closed down during this period.  It is one of my favorite moments in the calendar, and I toyed with the idea of having a dinner party at a nearby steak restaurant and inviting my favorite trainers from the gym along with my husband.  They, resolute escapees from the Roman Catholicism of their youth, were appalled and could not fathom my motive.  Well, I happen to like calendars studded with events which recall us to the great mythologies of western history.  The Christian story is such a narrative, rich in imagination and image.  It rivals the great mythologies of the Greeks and the Romans and deserves the same respect.  That does not mean belief necessarily, and since I am by conviction an atheist or agnostic I do not credit the story of the Virgin Birth and her later departure body and all into Heaven as anything bordering on reality, but nonetheless I like the story.  Some people are so literal minded alongside the most striking credulity.  I remember teaching a course to some Bronx born Hispanic girls who literally erupted in class when I brought up the notion of Zeus, the father of the Gods, as also a progenitor of many heroes of legend by virtue of his frequent love-making with the girls of the immediate human world.  If you go on Google, I pointed out, there is quite a strikingly long list.  "No," they shrieked, God cannot have sexual relations!"  "Says who?"I replied.  "It's just as likely as the Holy Spirit being able to impregnate a mortal woman.  Welcome to the world of mythology!" These offspring of Zeus are like the people who claim that their ancestors came on the Mayflower, it seems to me.  In any case, I have been to the coast of Turkey and seen the spot where Mary's corporal ascent into Heaven is said to have taken place.  I have seen the place in Delphi where the god Apollo is said to have slain the snake guarding the navel of the earth.  Few sites on earth visited by me have the natural sense of the presence of a god as Delphi has or had I should say before half the world's tourists on their fume spewing buses descended upon the place.  Once upon a time it was quiet, holy, and filled with the presence of a god, the entire town.