Impulse May 2020 “The Ascension”

5/9/2020

– FR. DOUG KLEIN

Read Acts 1: 1 – 11; Matthew 28: 16 – 20.

In our Opus Spiritus Sancti we often talk about living out our Easter-Pentecost spirituality. However, between those two celebrations comes the Feast of the Ascension of our Lord. For many years I found it easy to gloss over this feast and quickly move on. Yes, it is important, but I did not see the depth of what God truly wanted to communicate to us through this aspect of who Jesus is to us. I saw it simply as a way to communicate that the Risen Lord was no longer “walking” among us in a physical sense clearly visible to those fortunate disciples to whom he revealed himself and commissioned to go forth and spread the Good News. Jesus, as was appropriate, had “ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.”

In January of 2011 I was fortunate to have the opportunity to make an Ignatian 30-day silent retreat at the Sacred Heart Jesuit Retreat Center in Sedalia, Colorado. It was a very spiritually fruitful experience as I meditated on different aspects of Jesus’ life and salvation history. When my director invited me to spend time meditating on the Ascension, I honestly did not have high expectations of new insights. On the grounds of the retreat center was a statue of Jesus depicting the Ascension. I had passed it many times as it was next to a path I frequented. However, my director gave me the wise advice to “make sure that I took the time to reflect on it from various different perspectives.”

After meditating on the scripture passages of Jesus Ascension I went out to take some time by the statue. When viewing the statue from the pathway, as I had done on many occasions, the shape of Jesus is convex, curving away from the viewer. This was my typical way of viewing the event. Jesus with arm outstretched toward heaven, is soaring away from us, almost in a superman pose. Jesus is returning to where he truly belongs and I am staying here, for now anyway.

This time I went off the path and noticing a bench on the other side of the statue, I sat and meditated on what it was saying from this view. Immediately I noticed that from this angle the stature was a concave shape, with Jesus bending towards the earth. I also noticed clearly his other hand stretching towards the earth. It was as if he was reaching for me to grab my hand and pull me along with him. I realized that all that we know about Jesus reveals to us God’s saving hand reaching out to us, desiring through love to bring us home.

The mystery of the Ascension now reveals to us that Jesus forms the bridge for us. As the divine Son of God, he is reaching up to the heavens to pull them down towards us. As the Word made Flesh, he remains our brother reaching out to pull us upward. Jesus does not soar off leaving us behind but bridges heaven and earth. “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” Nor does Jesus leave his humanity behind, sloughing it off so to speak, to exist now only as the Divine Son. The Incarnation was permanent. Jesus, in ascending to the Father, carries our humanity with him so that we too can share in his divinity. I need just to remember to reach out and grab hold of his hand extended to me.

The Ascension then informs more fully our Easter – Pentecost spirituality. The Resurrected One has formed a connection for us to now, already, receive the life to come through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Fr. Karl Bruno, reflecting on the Ascension story from Luke writes, “nothing of looking perplexed, more than ever, nothing of a sad farewell. Only joy is mentioned here. Obviously what is at sake is to inform us that the disciples, on the occasion of Jesus exaltation had a new experience which superseded all sadness of farewell because it was stronger. It was the experience of a new and different kind of Christ’s presence than before in which all pain was turned to joy.” (Living the Spirituality of the OSS, 113)

Filled with this joy and the confidence that Jesus is with us always we can have faith in Jesus’ words from Acts. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” So let us not stand there looking for Jesus in the sky but go forth in confident joy of the ever-presence of our Lord, to spread the Good News, and “to pray unceasingly for a new Pentecost.”

“By a new Pentecost we mean a renewal of the Church from top to bottom, renewal for a genuine Christian lifestyle and renewal for deeper faith, greater trust, and contagious love – all wrought through the power from above.” (Bruno: A Spirituality of Pentecost) As we are all well aware our world needs this at this time more than ever. May God Bless you and keep you.