Woodward: The Ascension

Throughout most of the United States, the Feast of the Ascension will be observed liturgically this coming Sunday. In the ecclesiastical provinces of Boston, Hartford, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, and Nebraska -- and in the Woodward household -- 40 days still means 40 days, and the Ascension is celebrated on Ascension Thursday. Today.

The Ascension poses certain challenges to the Christian imagination. It did in the first century -- "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?" -- and it still does in the twenty-first. Here is a helpful comment from a man who was simultaneously one of the subtlest and one of the most straightforward of all Catholic preachers, Mgr. Ronald Knox.

Since the Ascension, it has been easier for us to imagine heaven as a desirable goal. Try as we will, the idea of heaven eludes us. Are we to think of it as a place, from which every element of unhappiness is excluded? But we know how much our love of places is conditioned by moods and sentiments, by the desire for change, by association and by history. Or are we to think of it as a state? But then, how are we to think of a state except in terms of selfish enjoyment? Or should we look forward to being reunited with those we have loved? But how frail they are, these earthly bonds; how time impairs them! No, when we have tried everything, we shall find no better window on eternity than St. Paul's formula, "to depart and be with Christ." If he has left us, and gone to heaven, it is so that we may no longer be disconcerted by the barrier of cloud that stands between us and it. We are not concerned to "go" here or there, or to be in this or that state of existence. We want to find him. So little, and so much it is given us to know about the ascended Christ.

--from a sermon preached at the London Oratory, May 13, 1956