Assumption Eve: the BVM Achieves Liftoff

I generally find it hard to have a lot of conviction about the Assumption of Mary - the idea that Mary's body, upon her death, was assumed into heaven. There's certainly no direct scriptural support for it, just the analogy of the prophet Elijah, who himself apparently disappeared into heaven.

Mary was a great prophet (possibly the greatest of the prophets, let those who oppose the ordination of women take note). What does a prophet do but speak the word of God, and what better way to speak the word of God than to literally give birth to it (John 1:14)? Add on a treatise on economic policy that politicians of all stripes would do well to study carefully (Luke 1:46-55) and you've got yourself a real prophet here.

So even though there's approximately zero in the way of scriptural support for the idea that Mary was taken directly into heaven, I'm inclined to just go along with it. First, the concept does no harm to the faith. Second, without something like the Assumption, how on earth do we end up with apparitions of Mary, and I love me some Virgin of Guadalupe (which I believe to be simultaneously a fraud and an act of God, but that's a topic for another time). Third, who am I to deny Jesus the right to rapture up his own mother?

But the Assumption, like the Ascension of Jesus into heaven, does run into a practical problem. Namely: we can totally fly into space and see that heaven isn't there. Nonetheless, my previous post notwithstanding, I really, really like Mary, and I like to imagine her life. Lacking any better imagery of where Mary went, I just went with a sort of holy NASA in a little snippet I submitted to a New York Times writing contest, where the challenge was to describe the sky in three sentences (I didn't win). This Assumption Eve, it's all I got:

Try to imagine the Assumption, how it must have felt for Mary, full of grace, the first woman to touch the sky (not Amelia Earhart, not Sally Ride). Perhaps it was a breezeless August day above Jerusalem, and she watched the earth recede through circles of carrion birds surveying Golgotha's latest harvest. The air whistling across her ears was alpine, now arctic, then gone, as she floated past the rings of Saturn and wondered which of the twinkling lights in the distance was Heaven's golden door.