Category Archives: Ascension

ASCENDING ALLELUIAS

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I OFTEN SPEAK about life’s being, for me, a colour-full affair. I’ve read on several occasions that some blind people can “see” in their dreams. This doesn’t surprise me.

Anger, anxiety,
adoration and awe,
celebration, communion,
confession, consolation,
consternation, contemplation,
dying, fear, joy,
lamentation, loneliness,
longing, love,
Magnificat, meditation, mediation,
passion, poetry, prayer and prose,
sadness, sleepiness, silence, song

- any and all forms of worship – often translate for me into vivid and fluid colour. The movement is gentle and healing. And thankfully, for a minimalist like me, the colour sometimes involves shades of plain and lovely uncluttered white. Neither the movement nor the colours are loud or aggressive or overwhelming. But they are bright. And each represents someone, some emotion, or some thing. A bit of time spent with “Alleluia” above may reveal some faces and one or two particular spaces …

In common with many artists, pray-ers and writers I think of our ultimate Heaven as fullness of life expressed in colours hitherto beyond our wildest seeing and dreams, but utterly reminiscent, too, of experiences we’ve known throughout our incarnate lives, here, in “this world”. Our hymn book contains a (much too long) version of the Ascensiontide “Hail the day that sees him rise”. Printed service orders (our Sunday usage) allow for discreet pruning. Not so when we use the hymn book, as we did on Thursday. So lots and lots of alleluias! For me though the words sometimes become the means of transport to a different level of seeing and / or hearing.

This “Alleluia” developed whilst humming “Hail the day” on and off over a period of about 48 hours. Sometimes these paintings start out with canvas or paper, paint and brush, and are photographed and digitally developed later. For this one the “medium” has been entirely my miracle iPad with BoxWave stylus. Have a great Sunday-after-Ascension. And may your Alleluias be colour-full and joyful.

AS(C)ENDING

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Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age – Matthew 28

JESUS DIDN’T SPEND a lot of time with his head in the clouds. He was a man, we might say today, who “had his feet firmly on the ground”. He was a man who commissioned disciples – learners – to wholly practical and diverse ministries here in this world. Today he might say “don’t be so heavenly minded that you’re of no earthly use”, or “don’t stand praying on street corners so that people can admire (or despise!) your praying. Rather, be the prayer!”

So if it’s required that I, or anybody, become too absorbed in the story of a man becoming a sort of ghostly sky-rocket on this, the Feast of the Ascension, we miss the depth of the myth. And the depth of the myth, it seems to me, points to the Christ-likeness, the Anointed-likeness of God that was patently present in Jesus, which presence, Jesus constantly suggested, was and is and will be present in all created things. The Christ-likeness of God, the Anointed-likeness of God, would be with our humankind “until the end of the age”. Forever. Always. No avoiding God, anymore than one can avoid the Life, the “anointing”, that flows from God.

Long ago I found reason to be profoundly thankful for the late and great Archbishop William Temple of Canterbury who died, greatly mourned, in 1944. In his Readings in St John’s Gospel the archbishop wrote

He is here now

In the days of his earthly ministry,
only those could speak to Jesus
who came where he was.
If he was in Galilee,
they could not find him in Jerusalem;
if he was in Jerusalem,
they could not find him in Galilee.
But his Ascension means that he is perfectly
united with God;
we are with him wherever we are present to God;
and that is everywhere and always.
Because he is ‘in heaven’, he is everywhere on earth;
because he is ascended, he is here now.

And James Brabazon, in The Turin Shroud, reflected

This is man

They say he will judge me. I’m convinced.
I am judged already. I stand before him, knowing
that like each man I am my own disaster.
He knows I know. He will be merciful.
This man looks like all that I ask of God -
I can call him both me and master.

ASCENT

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The Ascension by Garofalo, Italian High Renaissance Painter, ca.1481-1559

DID A CLOUD part Jesus “from our sight”? I don’t know. But the not knowing doesn’t trouble me, for I’ve no doubt in my own heart that Jesus has returned to the Father’s heart. That ascent, that returning (as from an exile) was the point of his life, and of our lives. All our lives. From the time of the Babylonian exile the Jews had spoken of “making aliyah” – of ascent, of a going up, to Jerusalem, Mount Zion, the vision of Peace, the hill of the Lord; a great returning from a place of exile to the fullness of life in the presence of God. And what they yearned for in their exile is what we yearn for in ours. Jesus reminded us of that again and again. And the fulfilment of our yearnings is not to be found in magic tricks, mountain-top encounters, stilled storms or any other “signs and wonders”, nor in temples made with hands, but is, rather, to be a spiritual turning and a re-turning. Metanoia. Stilling enough, silently enough, often enough, to see Life from another angle. To make ascent, to make aliyah, to go up and “into the House of the Lord” is to involve a reaching into the depths of our own hearts, souls, minds and bodies. Ascension is prayer, a constant reaching in and “going up” until the day when all created things cast the “crowns” of their own convoluted sense of their own self-importance before the Divine Self, “lost in wonder, love and praise” and – by now – fully with “him” – “risen, ascended, glorified”.

Look. I am with you (all of you) always
Even unto the end of the age …

Way to go! ALLELUIA!

AMONG THE DEEPER MYSTERIES

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AMONG THE DEEPER MYSTERIES in life perhaps the one we struggle with the most is the mystery of the Ascension. It’s not so much that we misunderstand it, we simply don’t understand it. What is the Ascension? – asks Fr Ron Rolheiser.

Why the empty seats at the Feast these days? How can we “proclaim afresh” the importance of the Ascension? Well, I’m sure I’ll not be alone in exhaling an hearty ALLELUIA having had sight of Fr Ron’s reflections …