May 17, 2007
The Feast of the Ascension of the Lord
By Rev. Joe McCloskey, S.J.
“…You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight. While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.” Acts 1:8-11
Then he led them (out) as far as Bethany, raised his hands, and blessed them. As he blessed them he parted from them and was taken up to heaven. They did him homage and then returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple praising God. Luke 24:50-53
(Note: The Ascension of the Lord is a Holy Day of Obligation. We celebrate this time – forty days after Easter – when Jesus Christ comes to the end of His life on Earth and happily ascends into Heaven. This reflection on the Ascension by Fr. Joe will appear in two parts -- Part One today and part two on Sunday, May 20 when the Church also devotes the daily readings for Mass to this feast.)
Piety
Lord, help us to be an uplifting experience for all of our brothers and sisters so that we may be drawn together in the wake of your going. Help us to find the way to the realization of the Resurrection in our own lives. Lord, strengthen our belief in the Resurrection. Help us accept your ascension as the beginning of our mission. Let us share the promises of your love to our world. Let your goodbye be our hello to the mission of sharing the love of your heart with our world. Let us be strengthened by the coming of the Spirit. Amen
Study
The Final Good-bye
http://www.usccb.org/nab/051707a.shtml
Goodbye has many different meanings. The Ascension is a goodbye; it signifies Christ is going to the Father and no longer with us in his pre-resurrection, un-glorified body. The human Christ seems gone forever and the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, remains. The humanness of Christ continues among us in the Sacraments. He is in every Christian by their Baptism into his life. Christ is present in the person we love. He is hidden from us in the person we neglect. Christ abides in us through Baptism and the indwelling of the Trinity. Christ enlivens the moment of Eucharist. Christ is in the midst of the two or three who gather in his name. We neglect to see the Christ whom we persecute by blocking the good another is doing. Christ is alive in the good deeds one does. Christ comes as the guest we welcome in his name. Christ is embodied in the Vicar of Christ. Christ speaks in the different forms of authority in the Church. Christ presides when civil leaders rightfully claim our obedience. Christ who stays and the Christ who left is one and the same person. The paradox of his going and staying at the same time is the mystery of Ascension. The going of Christ is his staying in a more ample way. Christ keeps his promise to remain with us forever in the Sacramental life of the Church. His love is celebrated in Eucharist all over the world from the rising of the sun to its setting. All the ways Christ reaches us are expressions of his abiding love
Ascension is “goodbye.” The ascension as the goodbye of all time teaches us how to say goodbye in time. It is not a good goodbye if we do not want to see the one we are leaving ever again. That is more like getting rid of someone. Christ is still present to his Church. His type of goodbye implies a return sooner rather than later. The ascension is the best of goodbyes because Christ will always we present to those he leaves. The mystery of divine indwelling is the mystery of God with us, not gone. The love poured out on the cross is enough for the whole world. The victory already won belongs to the Christ of the Resurrection. The ascension is a going which implies the all given, or soon to be given, in Pentecost.
Pentecost would enable the Apostles to make use of the gifts they already possessed. The coming of the Spirit would pull together and make sense out of all the Apostles had learned from Christ. Christ chose to leave but the Spirit would be sent to continue to instruct and strengthen the Apostles as they went about their task of passing on what Christ had taught them. Subsidiarity, the passing on of responsibility to another, is the result of Pentecost. It is a process that began in the ascension. We would be remiss in our duties if we left before a job was finished or before it had enough momentum to be finished without our help. Subsidiarity is possible when all the responsibility that needs to be given has been given. The responsibility of claiming the world for the Father is the mission Christ had from the God. What is still left of the task is continued in the Church. Christ could go because his mission had been passed on. The disciples had accepted the challenge. Christ gave them all they needed to accomplish this work. At Pentecost the disciples would discover what the going of the Ascension meant.
The disciples did not want Christ to go. They were told there would be some special message. They gathered in Galilee because they were told to do so. They received their mandate from Christ. If we are good at the work we do, some will be reluctant to take our job while we are around. If we have to go and the job needs doing, someone will be found to continue where we left off. The Apostles had to be told by the angels to move on. Do we ever believe someone we love is gone? The hardest part of celibate living is the desire to hold on to those we love. People come and go in our lives and they take our hearts with them. We have chosen to be celibates out of love for Christ. The very love we have for Christ allows us to know the truth of our heart. Christ lets us love one another with his love. Wherever there is love, God is there. God is there when Christ's love flows from our heart. The celibate man or woman lives the ascension by allowing those who are loved to move on to where they are needed. Celibates discover in their lives how loved they are, and how greatly they need the love of their brothers and sisters. Love wants the beloved close and feels strongly the separation. The Apostles were shocked to find that Christ was going. How can anyone let Christ go? The Apostles were the first of the many who would have to let a beloved go. However, for John, the “Beloved Disciple,” there would be no final goodbye to Christ. Their ongoing love would keep them close to each other so that even in the going there would be a staying.
The people of Appalachia were the first ones I ever met who said goodbye by telling me to stay. I stood up to leave and they said, “Stay a while.” I thought something was left undone. So I sat down again. Soon I thought they were foolish in telling me to stay if they had nothing more they wanted from me. It became a comedy of errors on my part as up, down, up, down I went, until finally I realized what they meant. They wanted me to stay because they had enjoyed the visit. “Please come back soon” would have been easier to understand than the stay awhile that meant goodbye. Yet the “Do not go” is so much more expressive of the attitude of the Apostles saying goodbye to Christ. The ascension could be the Christian celebration of a saying goodbye.
I felt deeply the reluctant goodbye of the Mountain people when my mother, who was terribly sick and at the end of her life, asked me if it was okay to pray for a quick death. If I told my mother too easily that it was okay to go, she would feel that we did not want her around. I had heard mom as she told my sister that I did not want her to go. I knew then that it was time to give her permission to go, because now she knew that we wanted her around no matter what the cost was to us. Her pain of living had reached such an intensity that it would have been terribly selfish to have held onto her. Leave taking takes so many forms. The night before she died I told the Lord that if he did not take her, I would not speak to him for a month, I would be that angry. When I was told later that she had just stopped breathing, I could rejoice because my goodbye was no longer reluctant. I wanted what was best for her.
Christ's ascension is the statement that the best is not here. Even as we would look for, Christ, our search will lead us to the Resurrection. Christ had the right to go where his happiness is. A tearful goodbye expresses the need for the other to stay. 'The Ascension fulfills Christ's need to be with the Father. We can want one we love to stay or go with us. Christ would send the Spirit so we would understand how to be his love. We would need to share Christ with those we love before we would go to be with Christ. The need to go and the need to take others with us would always be the tensions of goodbye.
While visiting my spiritual director, who was in a coma, I expressed to others my desire to pray over him because I did not want to let him go. A week or so later when he was home from the hospital, he described what he had experienced. He told me it was like being down a huge tunnel and hearing a voice calling: “I need you. Come back.” My need for him was selfish and not as great as his need for heaven. The next time I would not ask him to come back. I had said my goodbyes.
The Apostles by the intensity of their gaze had asked Christ to stay with them. They would have held on to him physically. Christ was free to go because he could leave behind the gift of himself. Even as Christ gave the Apostles the command to go into the whole world and claim the world for him through Baptism, he gave the promise of being with them until the end of time. Are we really willing to claim the promise of the goodbye of Christ? What does it mean to claim that promise? The paradox of Christianity is that although dying implies going, the going in Christ implies the staying.
We all make attempts at developing a way of experiencing God's presence. As young Religious we were told to make acts of the Presence of God. They were just words we said in the beginning of our spiritual life. One- liners, calling out the name of Jesus, asking mercy, were more frequently acts of the mind than cries of the heart. “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me'' supposed that Jesus could hear and was close. Today, hopefully, those Acts of the Presence of Christ express the reality of our hearts being present to this God of ours. Christ's presence should mean as much as the presence of the brothers and sisters whom we can touch. The years spent as religious speak a life dedicated to the presence of our Lord. Now we should be capable of recognizing his presence in each other and in our world.
Action
There is no fundamental difference between the presence of the Lord in a newly baptized baby and any one of the mystics of the Church. The love of God reaches out to the good and the bad alike; reaches all of us equally. This is an important insight for our spiritual journey. The devil has the same presence of God's love in Christ as we do. We should all look for the humanness of Christ in each other. How can we love the God we do not see, if we do not love the neighbor we do see? At some point, the potential of the presence is the same for all of us. The difference lies in the degree of the heart's acknowledgment and response to the presence. How much love do we give? Does the presence stay in the head or does in reach our hearts? God's love makes the world go around. Our hearts can respond to God's love in any moment of our lives. Spirituality finds the presence of our Lord by seeing through the disguise of the stranger who comes into our lives. The doors of our hearts will be open and then the Christ of our hearts, the Lord of our hearts, will be free to come forth in all we say and do.
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