Ferragosto - bit like a bank holiday

We have been in Florence for nearly a year and still parts of Italian culture and practise remain very strange to me.

For example, today. Typically for a bank holiday weekend, yesterday was rain and thunderstorms but today the sky is once again blue. "Ferragosto" is the name for the festival of assumption (or ascension) of Mary. It's a festival that has previously passed me by, as it isn't exactly a Protestant occasion (but for more on that, see below).

"Ferragosto" may come from the latin for a holiday to celebrate Emperor Augustine, but the Catholic/Orthodox/Anglican festival has different roots.

In San Marco Convento (home of the beautiful murals by Fra. Angelico including the famous Annunciation) is also a small art museum. There for the first time I saw a sequence of paintings of gospel scenes which culminated in the Crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven. Strange, I thought, as I've not read that in any canonical gospel! When, during a general conversation at language school, I related my confusion that this Crowning is not a gospel story the teacher (a non-practising Catholic) was quite adamant that it had to be!

And so today, I've paid a little more attention than normal to the meaning behind the day of holiday. The theory seems to be that Mary is the fulfilment of the promise of the general resurrection. Christ is the first-fruits of the resurrection from the dead, and the assumption of Mary is our proof. There is no canonical biblical evidence for this, although a quick google reveals a few biblical one-liners that are interpreted through the lens of Mariology. Quite honestly, this seems to me to be the worst kind of hermeneutical twisting.

The Catholic Church has remained imprecise about the details of the assumption. It is possible to believe that Mary died, was resurrected and then ascended, or that she ascended directly to heaven without dying. It seems to depend on quite what you believe about the sinlessness of Mary - if she is sinless, she cannot die so ascends directly. If you take this view, you may believe that "original sin" did not apply to Mary, and thus when Jesus is described as the "new Adam", Mary becomes the "new Eve". The Anglican Church again holds a variety of viewpoints: you may recognise the death of Mary, or you may hold either of the Catholic Church perspectives.

Besides wondering what on earth it means to compare mother and son with Adam and Eve, none of this made any difference in the Methodist church this morning. We are still enjoying the presence of the brothers and sisters from the Chiesa Valdese (and with only 1 Methodist in the congregation of 16 this morning, they are essential!). We were also confronted once again by the needs of the Romanian community here on the streets of Florence and the surrounding area. It is impossible to know how to respond when people ask for money to pay accommodation, or for a bus fare home, or, in one case, to pay a loan secured on the family home in Romania. The loan, for a reasonable substantial sum, was taken out to repatriate his father's body. To me, to take out the loan seems to have been a foolish decision, but what we do with bodies matters profoundly, what we believe about bodies is fundamental to our existence. Whether or not Mary ascended does affect what we believe about our life after death and about how we deal with "earthly remains". The impact of one funeral could see his family made homeless. At least believing in the assumption of Mary means that there has been no search for her body. It is very sad that cultural expectations about death are about to fall harshly on the living.