Feast of the Ascension

With gratitude as the context

Feast of the Ascension

Acts 1.1-11; Eph. 1.17-23; Mt. 28.16-20.

Today is the Feast of the Ascension and I'd like to propose that it's the one feast of the Church year that is supposed to call forth, with the loudest voice our powers of "Christian imagination".

What am I getting at? Well, when I was a little kid, they said the Ascension was a matter of Jesus, who was God, having done his business. Then he just sort of zipped up back to where he belonged and that was the end of it. But that is not faithful to the scriptural witness because at that point in the development of the following of Jesus, they did not believe that Jesus was divine, but rather that Jesus fulfilled, in his own life, everything that God had intended for us human beings to be. And this is why Jesus was raised from the dead by God. And then later Christian thought clarified this, as we believe to claim, that Jesus was divine. But as far as the New Testament writers were concerned, here was just a man who exemplified the fulfilment of human destiny for all of us.

And so what we are called to imagine is precisely the completion of that human destiny. What does it mean? What does it mean to have lived this life fully faithful to oneself, to God, to other people, and then, to go to God? This is what I mean by calling forth the powers of imagination. Because, unless we engage those powers, this feast day is not going to make much impact. As I've fretted over these texts for weeks at least that's the conclusion that I've come to.

It's interesting that Heaven, Jesus’ destination, or some surrogate form of heaven, seems to be modish today. We have these 2 current films "What dreams may come?" with Robin Williams and more interesting, by far, "Meet Joe Black". They both have to do with what happens after we die. The Williams film strikes me as a kind of infantile, sensate extravaganza in which God is not involved at all. Well God, interestingly enough, is not involved in either of these films. Except at the end of the "Meet Joe Black", a much more substantial piece, I think there is the clear intimation that this man, Anthony Hopkins in this case, and the way he lived his life is not going to be exterminated after death. Rather, beyond his death there is the very real sense of completion. It's interesting. It's very subtle. They don't mention God at all. There is no explicit religious reference throughout the entire film. But sure enough, in the last conversation between Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins there is the intimation that this man's life is going to continue in its own integrity and honesty and courage.

So, other peoples' imaginations are being engaged on this subject, and it's a reasonable thing to ask: What are our images of a completed life? I think the biggest obstacle to coming to that is the sense that, oh well, we need challenges all the time. At least we say we need them to be really ourselves. Except we don't behave that way. Sounds good, but we are not all that Nietschean in fact. We would all really rather be on the beach sipping pinna coladas, I think, most of the time. And that's our most constant desired sense of completion. But there is this element of truth in the notion of challenge that comes in reaction to a view of heaven that owes more to Aristotle than it does to the Bible. This says that we're just supposed to sit around and look at God. Boring, as the kids would say. And that's why we need to find some kind of imaginative energy to try to make sense of this, remembering all the time as Paul said that "Eye has not seen nor ear heard what God has prepared for those who love him." We take that as a given. But even with that as a parameter, what images can we bring to bear to this notion of human perfection?

This question has engaged me for the last couple of weeks. So I had to ask: where in my life can I point to some kind of experience where it seemed to me every cell of my being was activated when I seemed to be doing what I was made for as surprisingly, for it was very easy for me to discover. I had the great joy of directing an orchestra, not a very good orchestra, for four years. And it is absolutely the case that directing an orchestra involved me absolutely. Noting existed outside that world and everything in me was going full bore within it. It was an extraordinary experience. When you talk about being fully alive, alive to your fingertips, attentive, aware, in contact with other people. For me, it was that experience, quite extraordinary. And then I started casting around. Well, I suppose you know my oldest son N’gandwe, who's birthday it is today by the way. N’gandwe had polio when he was 5. He's 29 today. What would it be like if, somehow, N’gandwe could build muscle on those pencil thin legs and run and play football, and above all, as a good African, dance. What would it be like for him to have that experience? In other words, our lives are so constricted. We live at such minimum levels, I think, so much of the time that it's necessary, if we are gong to think about what completion would be most like, to look at those counter-instances in our lives, to find when we were most completely alive. Because that's what God intended: God wants us to be fully alive.

But the danger in using these images, of course, is that they can be totally God free. Do I need God as well as a baton to direct an orchestra? No. So it is whether it's sailing or surfing or whatever. It is that brings you the absolute sense of going with every ounce of who you are in your life. But with Jesus? What was it that the ascension meant for Jesus besides the completion of his career as a human being and his life with God? Well, you go back to the fundamental religious reality which is, of course, gratitude. Gratitude. To be religious is, by definition, to be grateful for one's life. And this is necessary to recall because too much of my life is lived in pain or disappointment or frustration or resentment or anger, so that gratitude gets eased off the map. Or pushed off the map more often than not. But imagine, if I could understand my life in this way. That God gave me that orchestra, that God gave me the arms to wield that baton. God gave me the communication that happens between musicians when they're trying their best to create something beautiful and wonderful. And having that awareness with gratitude as the context of the whole enterprise. Then, I propose, then heaven begins to really make sense.

Even more, what if everyone in this room were to look at each others' eyes and say, "I'm grateful that you exist." And see that gratitude for their own existence reflected in the eyes of the other. We don't. We can't. We're too needy. We're too circumscribed by our histories, by our diminished expectations of what is possible for us as human beings. We don't need Kosovo. All you have to do is go to a divorce court or a therapist's office to see, spelled large, how badly we get along. How unaware of who we really are and therefore how remote gratitude is. But now imagine. Imagine a massive shift. And God as the source of all this. Then I think that we can begin in some useful way to imagine what it would be like to ascend to God. Because that's the way it will happen.

It will happen altogether. It will not happen in some kind of private, or individualised fashion. Imagine what it would be like existing in utter gratitude for everybody and for our own life, which condition we can only really enjoy in the presence of God. Of course, on this side of that presence it is, as the Gospel of John says, a struggle. To try to be a real human being is simply hard work. That's why so few of us are so good at it. At least I'm speaking for myself. There's a wonderful statement to this effect by the great Caroll Houselander, (who ought to be canonised). This wonderful British lady writer said "No one is safe who is not constantly at war with themselves." "No one is safe who is not constantly at war with themselves." This great Christian Catholic woman. Well, what if we could be safe without being at war with oneself? But rather simply luxuriating in the absolute certainty that we are gifts to ourselves and that everyone else is a gift to us. And we do this in the presence of the gift giver. That's what I mean by applying our imagination to this feast and that the feast is the feast of the celebration of our imagination as Christians.

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