The Closed Loop

The Solemnity of the Ascension is not among the more heartily celebrated days of the liturgical year. Like the Epiphany, it suffers in many places the indignity of being moved away from its traditional day, and transferred to a Sunday.* However, it is even worse that this happens to the Ascension than to the Epiphany, because the Ascension has an explicit scriptural warrant for its traditional day; the first chapter of Acts indicates that the Ascension took place on the fortieth day from the Resurrection. We have several other Holy Days of Obligation which do not have explicit scriptural warrants for their dates, which we still do not hesitate to observe o  weekdays, so it is perplexing that the Ascension is treated differently. Furthermore, the obvious symbolic parallel – that this is the other side of the coin of the forty days of Lent – is lost when the traditional day is not kept. Not only that, but aside from the question of on what day the Ascension is observed, the significance of the day is underestimated by many. In my experience, it is far more rarely discussed than that of Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and almost all other Solemnities. This is a terrible mistake.

The story of our salvation is incomplete without the Ascension. To see how this is so, it is helpful to go all the way back to Eden. There our first parents enjoyed free and easy connection with the Almighty. However, following the first sin, they were exiled from Eden, and no longer could access the tree of life, from which they could have received immortality. Thus, human nature was cast out of the more immediate presence of God that we previously had enjoyed while our first parents remained within the garden. Hold on to that thought, and we will return to it. 

Speeding forward centuries from Eden, we come to the Incarnation, in which God became man at the moment Jesus was conceived. By coming into this world, he, though sinless himself, entered an infestation of corruption stemming from human sin, with the intention of providing humanity a way out. C.S. Lewis vividly portrays this by writing these words in his book Miracles:

...[O]ne may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to colour and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover.

The Ascension is the breaking of the surface of that water, Jesus Christ is the diver, and we humans are the precious, albeit dirty thing, that the diver has pulled up from the bottom. Thus, the Ascension is the fulfillment of the purpose for which Christ became man. 

Furthermore, the Ascension is the closing of the loop that began with our exile from Eden, because in the Ascension, human nature is brought back into the presence of God. Jesus takes on human nature in the Incarnation by descending to us, but he also “brings that human nature into the very heart of God,” as I once heard a wise preacher put it, by taking his human nature – body and soul – into heaven. We can press this even further: because we – the Church – are the body of Christ, he has brought us all, in a sense, back into God’s presence by ascending bodily into heaven.

There is a little-known Protestant hymn from the early twentieth century that is worth mentioning in connection with all of this. It was written by Cleland McAfee, a Presbyterian clergyman, after the sudden death of two of his very young nieces from diphtheria. The three verses deserve to be quoted in full here:

There is a place of quiet rest,
near to the heart of God;
a place where sin cannot molest,
near to the heart of God. 

There is a place of comfort sweet,
near to the heart of God;
a place where we our Savior meet,
near to the heart of God. 

There is a place of full release,
near to the heart of God;
a place where all is joy and peace,
near to the heart of God. 

And these verses are interspersed with the following prayer as a refrain:

O Jesus, blest Redeemer,
sent from the heart of God,
hold us who wait before thee
near to the heart of God. 

The great news of the Ascension is that Jesus has granted this prayer. In his own self, he has taken our own nature into the place of quiet rest, comfort sweet, and full release – into the nearer presence of God – into his own divine heart. Though in this life we remain in the midst of the infestation of corruption in the world, through our sacramental union with our Lord, we are already participating in the security, comfort, and triumph of being at the right hand of our Father. 

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*I know Corpus Christi has met the same fate in many places, but this seems less egregious. The day on which Corpus Christi is celebrated is not rooted in Scripture (like the Ascension), or in an ancient tradition so well-established that it has bled into popular culture (Epiphany, at the end of the famous "Twelve Days of Christmas"). Furthermore, if the choice of Thursday for Corpus Christi is in honor of the day of the institution of the Eucharist, then this duplicates Holy Thursday. We also can consider that the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, as it is currently constituted, is a blending of two previously existing feasts: that of the Precious Body (observed on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday) and that of the Precious Blood (observed on July 1st), and so moving the Solemnity to a Sunday even-handedly replaces the days of both of the former commemorations. Therefore, I do not think it is a bad idea to devote a Sunday to this mystery of the faith, just like we do on the preceding week for the Holy Trinity, especially since this will alllow for more time and freedom for the the typical layperson to participate in a Eucharistic Procession.