A Sunday Thought to Start the Week Off Right
In our weekday posts we've been focused on keeping the spirit of the Easter Season and bringing that spirit to work with us each day. As we approach the feast of the Ascension (really Thursday, although many dioceses in the U.S. have "moved" the feast to Sunday), we might think that it's time to "move on" and put Easter away in a closet somewhere. Far from it. We're just getting started. To understand how and why, consider the following. It's from a Catholic spiritual work, The Inner Life of the Soul. The Chapter on the Fifth Sunday after Easter (which is exactly where we are today) begins with a reference to the Feast of the Ascension:
"We have reached the feast that seems to be, in a certain sense, the end...We follow Him...catch His final words of Benediction, and...watch in silent ecstacy His upward rising through the air. Than all is over, and a cloud receives Him out of our sight... "
Many of us who have endured the rigors of the penitential Lenten Season followed by the joys of the glorious Easter Season may be tempted to slip back to "business as usual" at this point. But to do so would imply we haven't been at least touched by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, if not somehow changed. To help us understand how and why haven't reached an "ending" with the Ascension, the chapter first attempts to shake our senses out of their typical focus on the here and now, as the author attempts to draw us into the drama and mystery of the Ascension:
"Do we hear star call upon star in majestic chorus, as He goes upward and past them, He that made them first, and set them in their order, and gave even to the comet and the nebulae a law, a form, a place? Once again do not the morning stars sing together, and all the sons of God shout for joy? Does not earth herself catch great echoes of that triumphant, tremendous, gloriously jubilant chorus of the rejoicing spheres, as their Lord goes, Conqueror, home? When the grand gates swing open, does no magnificent thunder of welcome surge outward and downward to us who listen below?"
More poetry than cold, hard facts? Perhaps. But not at all false or even exaggerated. The author attempts to capture the supernatural in natural terms we can all understand. And it's a wonderful tonic to the skeptical, secularized, purportedly "scientific" view that would consign an event like the Ascension to something made-up, or at best the result of the fevered imaginations of Christ's followers. We need such tonics these days to remind us that the supernatural exists; it's not some Disney fantasy.
Back to why this isn't "the end" of Easter. Let's turn to one of the themes we've emphasized during these weeks of our Easter Season: union with God. We've seen that any serious spiritual life leads us there - whether we're contemplative monks or Catholic men in the workplace. Here we find the ultimate and deeply personal reason that Easter does not and can never end with the Ascension. Our striving for union does not weaken or dissipate as Our Lord rises into the clouds. We have been changed - even if only slightly - by our Lenten discipline and our embrace and celebration of the Risen Lord during these weeks. For most of us, that change may manifest itself in a greater self-control, a more secure self-mastery. Sin has lost some of its infernal grip on us. But that isn't the end of our journey. And so our author describes that profound change that comes from union with God.
(One quick note: Remember this was written in 1905, when the impact of electricity and electric illumination was rapidly gaining a foothold in everyday life. Today, we might substitute whatever technological advancement that promises a brighter future. Emphasis added.)
"We have touched upon a great law of the spiritual life, namely, that when men come closest to the Infinite, excitement dies, and there is a divine calm, a marvelous something, far beyond self-control and self-mastery - the entire union of the entire man with God. It follows upon the Ascension, when men have lost their relish for things earthly, and their hearts are always fixed on heavenly things, and the Holy Ghost in tongues of flame has come. In this peace, saints and saintly souls have borne the worst of calumnies in perfect and unanswering patience, till their foes have learned that there are those whom they are utterly powerless to browbeat, before whose Christ-like, prolonged silence calumny at last grows dumb. In this calm, the excitement which thrills and absorbs the intellectual world today, even as the electric current thrills and guides more and more of the business world, dies down completely, fading into nothingness. We look upward, and we see God, reigning absolute King forever..."
I don't know about you, but I'm definitely not there yet. Still, these passages go a long way to keeping me on my toes in my spiritual life. By God's grace, maybe I will get there someday. Maybe you will too.
"We have reached the feast that seems to be, in a certain sense, the end...We follow Him...catch His final words of Benediction, and...watch in silent ecstacy His upward rising through the air. Than all is over, and a cloud receives Him out of our sight... "
Many of us who have endured the rigors of the penitential Lenten Season followed by the joys of the glorious Easter Season may be tempted to slip back to "business as usual" at this point. But to do so would imply we haven't been at least touched by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, if not somehow changed. To help us understand how and why haven't reached an "ending" with the Ascension, the chapter first attempts to shake our senses out of their typical focus on the here and now, as the author attempts to draw us into the drama and mystery of the Ascension:
"Do we hear star call upon star in majestic chorus, as He goes upward and past them, He that made them first, and set them in their order, and gave even to the comet and the nebulae a law, a form, a place? Once again do not the morning stars sing together, and all the sons of God shout for joy? Does not earth herself catch great echoes of that triumphant, tremendous, gloriously jubilant chorus of the rejoicing spheres, as their Lord goes, Conqueror, home? When the grand gates swing open, does no magnificent thunder of welcome surge outward and downward to us who listen below?"
More poetry than cold, hard facts? Perhaps. But not at all false or even exaggerated. The author attempts to capture the supernatural in natural terms we can all understand. And it's a wonderful tonic to the skeptical, secularized, purportedly "scientific" view that would consign an event like the Ascension to something made-up, or at best the result of the fevered imaginations of Christ's followers. We need such tonics these days to remind us that the supernatural exists; it's not some Disney fantasy.
Back to why this isn't "the end" of Easter. Let's turn to one of the themes we've emphasized during these weeks of our Easter Season: union with God. We've seen that any serious spiritual life leads us there - whether we're contemplative monks or Catholic men in the workplace. Here we find the ultimate and deeply personal reason that Easter does not and can never end with the Ascension. Our striving for union does not weaken or dissipate as Our Lord rises into the clouds. We have been changed - even if only slightly - by our Lenten discipline and our embrace and celebration of the Risen Lord during these weeks. For most of us, that change may manifest itself in a greater self-control, a more secure self-mastery. Sin has lost some of its infernal grip on us. But that isn't the end of our journey. And so our author describes that profound change that comes from union with God.
(One quick note: Remember this was written in 1905, when the impact of electricity and electric illumination was rapidly gaining a foothold in everyday life. Today, we might substitute whatever technological advancement that promises a brighter future. Emphasis added.)
"We have touched upon a great law of the spiritual life, namely, that when men come closest to the Infinite, excitement dies, and there is a divine calm, a marvelous something, far beyond self-control and self-mastery - the entire union of the entire man with God. It follows upon the Ascension, when men have lost their relish for things earthly, and their hearts are always fixed on heavenly things, and the Holy Ghost in tongues of flame has come. In this peace, saints and saintly souls have borne the worst of calumnies in perfect and unanswering patience, till their foes have learned that there are those whom they are utterly powerless to browbeat, before whose Christ-like, prolonged silence calumny at last grows dumb. In this calm, the excitement which thrills and absorbs the intellectual world today, even as the electric current thrills and guides more and more of the business world, dies down completely, fading into nothingness. We look upward, and we see God, reigning absolute King forever..."
I don't know about you, but I'm definitely not there yet. Still, these passages go a long way to keeping me on my toes in my spiritual life. By God's grace, maybe I will get there someday. Maybe you will too.
Happy Easter!
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