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“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.”
(Gospel)

A Spirituality of the Ascension

The Ascension throws some important light on the mystery of love and intimacy. What’s the Ascension?

It’s an event inside of the life of Jesus and the early church, a feast-day for Christians, a theology, and a spirituality, all woven together into one amorphous bundle of mystery that we too seldom try to unpackage and sort out. What does the Ascension mean?

Time is a great healer though there’s a lot more to this than simply what washes clean or is anaesthetized by the passage of time.
Among other things, that the mystery of how we touch each other’s lives is strangely paradoxical in that the wondrous life-giving power of arriving, touching another’s life, speaking words that nurture, doing actions that build up, and giving life for another, depends also upon eventually leaving, being silent, absorbing rather than actively doing, and giving our goodbye and death just as we once gave our presence and our life. Presence depends too upon absence and there’s a blessing we can only give when we go away.

That’s why Jesus, when bidding farewell to his friends before his ascension, spoke these words: “It’s better for you that I go away.” “You will be sad now, but your sadness will turn to joy.” “Don’t cling to me, go instead to Galilee and I will meet you there.”

How might we understand these words? How is it better that someone we love goes away? How can the sadness of a goodbye, of a painful leaving, turn to joy?

This is something that’s hard to explain, though we experience it daily in our lives. Allow me an example: When I was 22, in the space of four months, my father and mother died, both still young. For myself and my siblings, the pain of their deaths was searing. Initially, as with every major loss, what we felt was pain, severance, coldness, helplessness, a new vulnerability, the loss of a vital life-connection, and, the brutality and finality of something for which there is no preparation. There’s nothing warm, initially, in any loss, death, or painful goodbye.

Time is a great healer (though there’s a lot more to this than simply what washes clean or is anaesthetized by the passage of time). After a while—for me this took several years—I didn’t feel a coldness any more. My parents’ deaths were no longer a painful thing. Instead their absence turned into a warm presence, the heaviness gave way to a certain lightness of soul inside me, their seeming incapacity to speak to me now turned into a surprising new way of having their steady, constant word in my life, and the blessing that they were never able to fully give me while they were alive began to seep ever more deeply and irrevocably into the very core of my person. The same was true for my siblings. Our sadness turned to joy and we began to find our parents again, in a deeper way, in Galilee, namely, in those places where their spirits had flourished while they were alive. They had ascended and we were the better for it.

Ron Rolheiser
Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser. Currently, Father Rolheiser is serving as President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas. He can be contacted through his web site, www.ronrolheiser.com.
Art by Martin Erspamer, OSB
from Religious Clip Art for the Liturgical Year (A, B, and C). This art may be reproduced only by parishes who purchase the collection in book or CD-ROM form. For more information go http://www.ltp.org