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Ascension 2017

We are nearing the end of our Easter Season as we celebrate the Ascension of the Lord today, and then Pentecost Sunday next weekend.

Both of these feasts help us to further make connections to the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ with the lives, deaths, and resurrections of our own. Our share in this paschal mystery is both concrete and personal, though not individual.

Our understanding of the Ascension is often the linchpin to the way that each of us explains Christ in the world today. Preaching on this Sunday, though no small challenge, has often left us believing that the Ascension was a sort of final farewell for Him, a bon voyage in which we are left trying to figure out how to get Christ back down to earth.

We’ve been left with the understanding that Christ is present here and there, now and then, and so we have difficulty making any sense of how Christ can be integrally connected to our own lives - all of the time – in all circumstances.

The reality is that His Ascension did not leave us with a hit-and-miss presence, leaving us trying to figure out how to make him magically appear. The pervasive presence of Christ can and should leave us in awe of how near our God really is to us.

“One body and one Spirit…one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

It’s all about the paschal mystery

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In his book The Holy Longing, Ronald Rolheiser presents an expanded explanation to the paschal mystery that bears noting in relation to this Feast and the mystery it describes, not only about the life of Christ but also for we followers of Christ.

He names five stages of the paschal cycle:

1. Good Friday - the loss of life - real death.

2. Easter Sunday - the reception of new life.

3. The Forty Days - a time for adjustment to the new and grieving for the old.

4. Ascension – the refusal to cling to old, letting it go all-together and letting it bless you.

5. Pentecost - the reception of a new spirit for the new life received at Easter.

Those same stages applied to us personally and individually are restated this way by Rolheiser:

1. Name your deaths.

2. Claim your births.

3. Grieve for what you have lost and adjust to the new reality.

4. Do not cling to the old, let it ascend and give you its blessing.

5. Accept the spirit of the life that you have within you.

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The dyings and risings that you and I prepare for in our lives are a continual cycle of faith development. Our longings for what was, can often frustrate us, disappoint us, even leave us angry.

But, as the disciples learned, what was…can never be again. Our desire to cling to past must be transformed into the reality of what is today.

Yes, we often long for the past, my friends, but the Ascension does not allow us to turn back.

May our celebration today help us look forward to the future – joyfully.