A Reflection on the Ascension of Christ

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By Brother David

With the Ascension, the heart of Jesus now beats in the heart of the Trinity, and in him, we too make that journey into the heart of God.  Our journey through the Passion, from its beginning in Lent, through Paschaltide, and up to now in the feast of the Ascension, is a journey to enlightenment in ourselves and in the world.  This process of enlightenment, this coming to awareness towards which we strive in our lives, is not a time of consolation or good feeling; rather, it is a time of destruction.  This is a time when all those lies which we have accepted, which we have perpetrated on ourselves, which we have been given by our families, our society, and, yes, sometimes even our church must be stripped away.  It is through these lies in which we have actively, passively, or merely tacitly participated that we are separated from ourselves, from each other, and from the One who made us.  This stripping and integration is the purpose of our Christian life: Jesus says, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”

The aim of our life is to fulfill the call from Genesis, to come to know and to realize (make real) that we are made in the image and likeness of the God of Jesus.  This is not about being good.  This is not about being better.  This is rather about becoming Godlike which goes beyond anything we can conceive of as “good.”  In this feast, we celebrate the union of God with the union of all people so that we come to be where we were made to be with our hearts beating within the heart of God. 

So how do we bring ourselves to this?  And what is the heart that we present?  How do we open ourselves more deeply to the truth to which God calls us? How do we allow ourselves to be purified in the crucible of God?—a crucible in which our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:26)  We come to this through love: love not of a sentimental nature, love not in some way feeling good about ourselves or even feeling good about each other.  Rather love in coming to see the truth of ourselves, the truth of the other, and the truth of God.  And through this we are destroyed because no one can see the face of God and live—and certainly not to live as we have lived.  (Exodus 33:20) 

We have no idea what is beyond this destruction.  We cannot imagine it; it cannot be spoken.  St Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians, “I was caught up to the third heaven fourteen years ago. Whether I was in my body or out of my body, I don’t know—only God knows.  Yes, only God knows whether I was in my body or outside my body. But I do know that I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell.”  (2 Corinthians 12:2)  Will it be great and glorious?  We can imagine that.  Will it be life without pain or age?  We can imagine that.  It will be beyond anything we can imagine.  This is what we are called to and called to be.

And if we are called to be this in the heart of God, how much more are we called to be this in the hearts of each other and in the heart of the world, where we are called to bear witness to this love of God—to this truth of God—where we are called to crucifixion and persecution which we embrace, not out of some misguided masochistic yearning for death, but out of an awareness that only this can transform the world.  This is what the apostles were called to.  That this is what the Holy Spirit gives us the power to do—this spirit which is sent from the heart of God. 

This is a feast of joy, this is a feast of enlightenment, this is not a feast of consolation.  It is a call to deeper life in God.  It is a call to greater purity of heart as we are refined and purified—as we are brought to the place where our response is a response from the deepest part of who we are, from the divine spark with which we were imbued from the beginning, not a response from the lie which we were given by our society and our families and which we have constructed within ourselves. 

Let us, like the apostles, then, bear witness to the Crucified One, the one who was raised to life with God and life in God.  And let us realize that this is also our calling: not to be good, not merely to life eternal, but rather to be Godlike coming ever closer through all eternity to becoming God in Godself.  

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