Here in Ephesus, she was now as she was then: a girl, a woman, waiting and watching for the angel who would announce the word of her passing into the heaven where her Son ruled at the right hand of the Father. She was not afraid. She needed no Gabriel to reassure her. She’d lived too long in the immensity of the mystery to doubt. Nor did she wonder who she would be in eternity. She would be who she always was: Mary, the mother of God’s Son. She suspected that would be her role for all eternity: mother, woman, the completion of the love of the mysterious faces of God—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—the mystery moving through the three of them into her, visible in eternity as it is invisible on earth.
