"While he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven." (Luke 24:51)
There are mysteries in the life of Our Lord so tender that even our words feel small before them. The Ascension is one of these. Forty days after the empty tomb, our Risen Lord, true God and true Man, bearing in His glorified Body the wounds of His Passion, was lifted up before the eyes of His Apostles and entered the glory of the Father.
This year, the Solemnity falls on Sunday, May 17. In many dioceses of the United States, the feast has been transferred from its ancient Thursday to the following Lord's Day. Where it remains on Thursday, it is kept as a Holy Day of Obligation. The Ascension is among the oldest feasts of the Church. St. Augustine called it the feast that "confirms all the others," for in it the whole work of our redemption is offered, in the Person of the Son, to the Father.
The Mystery We Celebrate
The Ascension is not a farewell. It is a fulfillment.
For forty days after His Resurrection, Our Lord walked among the Apostles. He opened to them the Scriptures. He breathed the Holy Spirit upon them. He commissioned Peter to feed His sheep. Then, on Mount Olivet, lifting His pierced hands in blessing, He was taken up. A cloud, the same cloud of glory that overshadowed Sinai and the Virgin's womb, received Him out of their sight.
When Christ ascended, He did not leave His humanity behind. He bore it with Him. The Body conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, nailed to the Cross and risen from the tomb, was carried into the very heart of the Trinity. Our flesh has a home now in Heaven, because His does. Where the Head has gone, the members are called to follow.
A Feast for Our Age
We live in a time of great noise and great loneliness, in which many souls have been told the heavens are empty and meaning is something they must invent for themselves. Even the baptized can be tempted to a quiet despair, wondering whether grace is still at work in a world that seems determined to forget its Lord.
To such an age, the Ascension speaks with peculiar tenderness. It is not the story of a God who left, but of a God who reigns. "He ascended into Heaven," we profess each Sunday, "and is seated at the right hand of the Father." The Lamb who was slain has taken His throne. Hebrews tells us He is always living to make intercession for us. Always. Even now.
He did not leave us orphans. He left us the Holy Spirit, the Sacraments, His Blessed Mother, the Apostles and their successors, and above all the Most Holy Eucharist, where the same Body that ascended is laid upon the altar at every Mass. The world tells us we are alone. The Ascension answers: you have never been less alone.
To Lift Our Hearts
Sursum corda, the priest sings at every Mass. Lift up your hearts. That ancient dialogue is the spirituality of the Ascension in a single breath. To lift our hearts is not to despise the earth, but to see this world as Christ sees it, soaked in the possibility of grace. It is to live as pilgrims, citizens of Heaven who labor for the city of man, knowing our King has gone ahead to prepare a place for us.
As the feast approaches, make a holy hour if you can. Read the Ascension accounts in Luke and Acts. Pray the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, lingering on the second mystery. Ask Our Lady, who watched her Son rise from her sight, to teach you how to hope as she hoped before Pentecost.
Between the Ascension and Pentecost, the Apostles withdrew with the Blessed Virgin to the Upper Room and devoted themselves to prayer. The Church has always seen in those nine days the first novena. Our age, too, is a kind of long vigil. The Lord has ascended. He has not yet returned. Between the already and the not yet, the Church waits for the Bridegroom.
This Sunday, in whatever pew finds you, lift up your heart. The heavens are not empty. They are full of Him.
A blessed Ascension.