Ascension Sunday

This Sunday we will celebrate the Ascension.So what is that all about?

Bosco Peters on his Liturgy website offers us this reflection (which I have slightly edited)

“There is much to enrich us in monastic spirituality. Benedictine spirituality in many ways is the undergirding spirituality of Anglicanism. The monastic tradition of “fuga mundi” (“flee the world”), however, is too easily misinterpreted as an anti-creation, other-worldly, so-heavenly-minded-as-to-be-of-no-earthly-use spirituality. This has little validity in a world in ecological crisis, or in a religion that believes in Incarnation. And resurrection. And sacraments.

God did not dress up in a human body and then discard this at death, returning to some preferable spiritual state. God’s hypostatic union to creation is permanent. Christ retains his full, created, creaturely, humanity in the resurrection. Including his body. The Ascension proclaims and celebrates Christ takes this creation into the full presence of God. The metaphorical language of “up” must never allow for an escapist spirituality. If we do not find God in our everyday life of work, sport, friends, food, music, nature, bodies,… we do not find God at all.

Ascension is not a literal date – even Luke, whose chronology most quickly springs to mind, has the Ascension on Easter Day in his gospel, and forty days later in his volume two, the Acts of the Apostles. For John, Jesus ascends, is lifted up, on the throne of his cross. Roman Catholics, in New Zealand and elsewhere, celebrate Ascension 43 days after Easter Day!

Ascension Day commences the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in the Southern Hemisphere. That the Northern and Southern Hemisphere cannot even agree on dating the week of prayer for Christian Unity is in itself, sadly, worthy of reflection.” 

Why then might we remember this event? What does it offer us in our life in God? What hope, what image is held in this for us?

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