A
Reflection for the Feast of the Ascension All
Saints Church, Southern Shores, NC May 8, 2016 Thomas
E Wilson, Rector
Ascending While Descending
Today I want to talk about the Ascension as the
lessons from the Acts of the Apostles and Luke’s Gospel tell the story of the
Ascension. I want to move beyond trying
to explain it by using the images of a literal reading. We no longer believe in
a three tiered universe as the earth is the center, the heaven above and the
place of the dead beneath; and we will not spend time arguing about Jesus
ascending by the speed of light and if
so; is he still on his way since the center of this galaxy is 27,000 light
years away?. The writers of scripture were not all that interested in putting
down literal facts but attempting to get at a deeper truth through the uses of
symbolic language.
That paradox is also found in the early church
identified as the place of the Ascension, which was a cave, one of the three
mystic caves identified by Constantine’s mother Helena. These three were the
Cave of the Birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, the Cave of Tomb of the Burial and
Resurrection in Jerusalem and the Cave of the Ascension near the top of the Mount
of Olives. The caves are counterintuitive in the three tired universe in that
in order to be united to heaven we must go deeper in dying to the world. Later
on as the church moved to more of rational and literal ways of thinking the
Chapel for the Ascension was moved to the top of the Mountain open to the sky.
The later when Saladin conquered the Christians it was turned into a mosque.
I was reading a good mystery novel last week as a
way of getting away from church work because mystery novels have a beginning,
middle and end as opposed to church stuff which seems to have no end. Except, I
find that even in the middle of mystery novels there are, at their core,
theological reflections; “What is the meaning of Life? What moves people to try
to take on the role of the divine over another person? How is redemption found?
What are the limits of the Rational Mind?”
In this novel the protagonist is a functional
atheist because his grief has taken him to a place where the childlike Bible
stories seem ridiculous to his modern mindset. As part of the protagonist’s
journey, he stops in a cathedral in Yorkshire and listens to the choir practice
and, in an act of what he calls superstition, he lights a candle for his
deceased wife. I know that spiritual place because I lived there after my
father died when I was in college; the old literal stories taught me in Sunday
school were hollow. However, I would have this habit and knell down in empty
churches and say memorized prayers to a God, for whom I thought I had no use
and had outgrown. In the novel the protagonist looks up to the cathedral
ceiling and sees an artistic representation, carved into the ceiling centuries
before, of the last view of Jesus the disciples saw in the Ascension; the soles
of the feet of the ascending Christ. To him that was the spiritual equivalent
that particular Elvis has indeed left the building
It reminded me of other artistic representations
which focused on the soles of the feet especially the Salvador Dali, The Ascension of Christ. (http://www.sdmart.org/sites/default/files/dali_1_1.jpg)
What Dali does is to move the Ascension from a depiction of literal event in a
three tired universe of two thousand years ago to a symbolic event set in
Spiritual time and place, in which Jesus is ascending into a cloud of energy,
into the embrace of a heavenly woman reaching down as he enters into the
nucleus of an atom, the basis of all life. The feet are dirty because they have
walked on the earth.
When I look at that painting of earth being brought
into heaven, I recall the words of the 4th Century theologian
Athanasius who said that “God became humanized that we might become divinized.”
As God in the form of the human Jesus enters into the full messiness of human life, love,
friendship, poverty, healing, betrayal, forgiveness, death, and all of what we
call human life in the incarnation; so God brings us, the everything of who we
are into total union with God. Heaven is not up there somewhere but here with
us if we would stop thinking with our rational mind. As the disciples could no
longer see because of the cloud, or the cloudiness of their spiritual life and
they had to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost for them to see,
and live into, their participation with the divine.
It takes a different kind of vision to see the
spiritual. It was another painting by Salvador Dali that helped me to come back
to a semblance of faith. I was first introduced to Salvador Dali’s Sacrament of the Last Supper ( http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-object-page.46590.html
) when I was changing buses on trips home on school breaks from Chapel
Hill. There were several hours between
connections in Washington, DC and I would go down to the National Gallery and
stare with awe at how Dali was able to deconstruct the Last Supper. No copies
can do it justice but I carted one around for years to get me through visits to
the District. Dali wrote: “This rite is expressed with plastic means and not
with literary ones. My ambition was to incorporate to Zurbarán's
mystical realism the experimental creativeness of modern painting in my desire
to make it classic.” Religion for me cannot stop on the familiar rational
surface of facts in which we are comfortable but must go deeper into the
underlying mystery which is not resolved but entered into. The beginning of
true religion begins in awe, of an experience which we cannot explain in words
of prose. Mystery is irrational and
speaks best in symbols and the irrational side of Art was able to speak to my
Spiritual soul when words proved empty. I did not think I could tolerate
another sermon asking for my rational acceptance of something irrational but
with faith I do not have to.
My understanding of the Ascension is that is the
other side of the spiraling circle of Divine Being entering into us and we
entering into the Divine energy. When I was doing empty prayers in empty
churches God was already there, waiting for me to get through my functional
atheism. God is still lovingly waiting, calling each of us to enter into the
center of creation as the fullness of heaven.
Ascending
While Descending (Poem)
The
young man pulled down the kneeler,
resting
his knees on the cushion.
He
jerked himself up to full prayer posture,
not
any of this old people three point squat.
No,
he was going to make his knees hurt.
Maybe
the pain will summon the shy one,
as
the knees would match the heart.
He
waited . . . then said the rituals.
Then
he grumbled for the fictional one
to
get moving off that far away throne.
So
concerned with his own performance
that
he did not leave room for listening
to
Spirit, breathing around, and in, him,
vainly
calling him deeper and higher.
The
boy left and went to look at some art
by
a weird Spaniard. paint the breath.
He
wasn’t sure, but maybe it was then
he
started hearing whispers again in
ascending/while descending.
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