Lisa Bowden

Friends,

Today is the Feast of the Ascension, celebrated 40 days after Easter and 10 days before Pentecost. The Sunday inside that is the Seventh Sunday of Easter or the Sunday in Ascensiontide.

The Latin terms from which the feast name comes, ascensio and, sometimes, ascensa, signal that Christ was raised up by his own powers. Part of the Apostle’s Creed we recite each Sunday reminds us of Christ’s ascent into heaven, and of his seat at the right hand of the Father.

As a young kid in Catholic church, the Creeds and Lord’s Prayer became a part of my own cellular or muscle memory. Christ’s descending, rising, and sitting next to God were all extremely visual, and to me, literal movements I could track in my imagination. A mystery that became bodily became a tad graspable to me.

I loved the billowing clouds and flowing robes. The lift up and hovering just above earth which connected those of us walking in the gravitational field to a heaven above. All the representations of the mystery of Ascension I saw as a child (someone raised in a family culture that appreciated, made, and valued both art and staring at the sky—counting stars, looking for shapes in clouds) offered an awesome orientation to be upwardly curious.

Thinking about Christ’s fusion with all creation, I like what Bonnie Smith Whitehouse says about Ascension Day connecting Jesus to the air and sky. The readings in Acts and Luke for today mention the “convincing proofs” Jesus gave the disciples appearing to them during the 40 days after his suffering, promising baptism by the Holy Spirit before being lifted up into the clouds.

I had a curious conversation with a priest once who pondered out loud the various kinds of thinking on what’s happening in the Ascension for us in the times of vast awareness of science. The sometimes comical visual of Christ’s feet dangling just below the bottom of a cloud pop up alongside Rembrandt’s 17th c masterwork of the “Ascension” in my mind. Is it more of a rising up in the heart of hearts—the unlocatable place where we are changed?

It’s a challenge to try to write and talk about the mysteries, which to me require multiple registers of understanding at once, but I wonder where you, dear reader, land amidst the mystery of Ascension? And wonder how you speak about it?

Peace,

—Lisa