The Ascension Of Jesus

The Ascension marks the beginning of a new phase in Christ’s relationship to humanity, kind of a "spiritual presence of the absence“ for baptized believers.

After all, “Christianity was founded upon the loss of a body,” writes the Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau, what he calls “an impossible mourning.”

1.What in our lives is needing to let go of, to ascend, as it were, and to let that letting go bless us that we might receive the Spirit we need for a new era in our lives?

e.g. There comes a point where a couple’s love attains the height of its freedom and becomes the basis of a healthy autonomy, says Pope Francis, about married love.

This happens when each spouse realizes that the other is not his or her own, but has a much more important master, the one Lord. No one but God can presume to take over the deepest and most personal core of the loved one; he alone can be the ultimate center of their life. At the same time, the principle of spiritual realism requires that one spouse not presume that the other can completely satisfy his or her needs. The spiritual journey of each – as Dietrich Bonhoeffer nicely put it – needs to help them to a certain “disillusionment” with regard to the other, stop expecting from that person something which is proper to the love of God alone. This demands an interior divestment. The space which each of the spouses makes exclusively for their personal relationship with God not only helps heal the hurts of life in common, but also enables the spouses to find in the love of God the deepest source of meaning in their own lives. Each day we have to invoke the help of the Holy Spirit to make this interior freedom possible. Amoris Laetitia 320.

2. We let go to go-

In the golden days of the West, one of the major means of transportation was the stagecoach.

A first class ticket meant you could sit down. No matter what happened, you could remain seated. If the stagecoach got stuck in the mud or had trouble making it up a steep hill, or even if a wheel fell off, you remained seated because you had a first-class ticket.

A second class ticket meant that you got to sit down until there was a problem, and then you had to get off until the problem was solved. You got off, stood to the side, and watched somebody else fix the problem. When the situation was corrected, you could get back on the stagecoach and take your seat again.

A third class ticket meant that you got to sit down until there was a problem, and then you had to get off and push! You had to help solve the problem.

The Ascension of Christ is about being willing to travel with a third-class ticket.

Christ “sitting at God’s right hand” means participating in Christ’s divine dominion over space, says Pope Benedict 16th.

Jesus is present always in the Eucharist, and he has given us power to direct our lives in accordance with God’s will and overcome obstacles.

He gives us that power by receiving his priestly blessing. St. Luke speaks of Jesus' "lifting of the hands" which is the terminus technicus for priestly blessing, and Luke says, "he blessed them.”

Malcolm Muggeridge asked Mother Teresa if she thought working with the poor was the way to find God, she replied: "Because we cannot see Christ [in the flesh], we cannot express our love to him; but our neighbors we can always see, and we can do to them what, if we saw him, we would like to do to Christ In the slums, in the broken human body, in children, we see Christ, and we touch him."

“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."

This implies we have things to do for Christ.