Ascensiontide, days of confidence

Ave Maria! These days of Ascensiontide are also ones of what Bl. Columba Marmion describes as "unshakeable confidence." In his marvelous book Christ in His Mysteries, he explains that "Above all, that confidence is based on the all-powerful standing Christ has with His Father, not only as invincible King inaugurating His triumph, but as Supreme High Priest interceding for us after having offered to His Father an oblation of infinite value."

Invincible King! The One who died upon on the cross could never be overcome by sin and death. With all-conquering love, He speaks to us, "Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, the one who lives. Once I was dead, but now I am alive forever and ever. I hold the keys to death and the netherworld" (Rev 1:17-18). The King of Love on Calvary is now and forever the great king over all the earth (Ps 47:2). He has established his throne in heaven. and his kingdom rules over all (Ps 103:19). How great are his signs, how mighty his wonders; his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion endures through all generations (Dan 3:100). The Lord of Hosts! The King of Glory! Who has "redeemed us at the cost of infinite love and charity" (Fr. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet) and "has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father" (Rev 1:6)! In Jesus our King, who lives and reigns for ever and ever, our confidence is secure.

But wait, there is more! Our King is also our Supreme High Priest! He who offered the sacrifice of Himself (Hebrews 9:26) now lives forever to make intercession for us (Heb 7:25), appearing in the presence of God on our behalf (Heb 9:24). Bl. Columba says that Christ, "High Priest who is always heard, repeats for us His priestly prayer at the Last Supper": "Father, I pray for them… They are in the world… Guard those you have given me… I pray for them, that they may have my joy made full in themselves… Father, I will that where I am, they also whom you have given me may be with me; so that they may behold my glory, which you have given me…so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them" (see Jn 17). Our confidence is founded upon the Sacrifice of the Lamb of God, whose offering "has made perfect forever those who are being consecrated" (Heb 10:14). "Souls of little faith, what is there for you to fear?" asks Bl. Columba. "What can you not hope for? Jesus prays for us, always!" He adds, "He is the beloved Son in whom the Father is well-pleased. How can he not be heard after having, by His Sacrifice, manifested such love to His Father?"

The Lord is our King and High Priest! What absolute confidence is ours! And so our hearts rejoice, our souls are glad (Ps 16:9). Dear ones, with confidence and joy, let us always sing:  Praised be Jesus Christ, now and for ever! Amen! Alleluia!

Ascensiontide, days of joy

Ave Maria!  These days of Ascensiontide are such happy ones!  Ours is the joy of the apostles who, after their Lord and Master ascended into heaven, "returned to Jerusalem with great joy" (Luke 24:53).  We, like them, so blessed with the gift of faith, "are convinced of a new presence of Jesus," certain that he is now present "in a new and powerful way," as Pope Benedict XVI writes in Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week.  "'Ascension' does not mean departure into a remote region of the cosmos but, rather, the continuing closeness that the disciples experience so strongly that it becomes a source of lasting joy...  The departing Jesus does not make his way to some distant star.  He enters into communion of power and life with the living God, into God's dominion over space.  Hence he has not 'gone away,' but now and forever by God's own power he is present with us and for us."

God is with and for us!  What deeper joy could we have on earth and in heaven!  And heaven is so much more than we realize!  It is not, the Holy Father wrote years ago in his book Dogma and Preaching, "a place beyond the stars, but something much greater, something that requires far more audacity to assert: Heaven means that man now has a place in God."  Our place in God is Christ our Lord, "the man who is in God and eternally one with God [and] at the same God's abiding openness to all human beings. Thus Jesus himself is what we call 'heaven;' heaven is not a place but a person, the person of him in whom God and man are forever and inseparably one. And we go to heaven and enter into heaven to the extent that we go to Jesus Christ and enter into him. In this sense, 'ascension into heaven' can be something that takes place in our everyday lives."

Jesus, the closeness of the Father, the very presence of the Father, invites us this day -- this very moment! -- to ascend into heaven.  Oh, let us rise with Him that our joy, so full in Him, may spring forth for the life and salvation of all!  Alleluia!

The Ascension of Our Lord

Now is the Son of man glorified,

and God is glorified in him.

~John 13:31

Yes, let us rejoice! Those who love Jesus experience a deep and intense joy in contemplating Him in the mystery of His ascension, in thanking the Father for having given such glory to His Son, and in felicitating Jesus at His being the object of it.

Let us rejoice, as well, that this triumph and glorification of Jesus is ours also.

"I ascend to my Father who is also your Father, to my God who is also your God" (John 20:17). Jesus simply precedes us: He does not separate Himself from us, He does not separate us from Himself. His entering into His glorious kingdom is so as to prepare a place for us there; "I go to prepare a place for you" (John 14:2). He promises to return one day: "I am coming again, and I will take you to myself; that where I am, there also you may be" (John 14:3). And so we are already, by right, in the glory and felicity of Christ Jesus; we shall be there one day in reality. Has He not asked this of His Father? "Father, I will that where I am, they also whom you have given me may be with me" (John 17:24). What power there is in that prayer, and what sweetness in that promise!

Let our hearts be given wholly to this joy, this intimate and altogether spiritual joy. Nothing dilates our souls so much as this feeling, nothing makes us go more generously forward along the running-track of obedience to the Lord's precepts: "I have run the way of your commandments, when you enlarged my heart" (Psalm 118:32). During these holy days of Ascensiontide, let us repeat often to Christ Jesus the ardent aspirations of the hymn of the Feast: "Be our joy, O you who will one day be our reward; and may all our glory dwell in you, forever and ever" (Hymn of Vespers and Lauds, Monastic Breviary).

~Bl. Columba Marmion in Christ in His Mysteries

You will show me the path to life, abounding joy in your presence,

the delights at your right hand forever.  (Psalm 16:11)

O Lord, my God, for ever will I sing your praise!

Amen!  Alleluia!

Ascension Living

By His Ascension, our Lord Jesus Christ has already opened heaven to us; hence we can no longer live restless, undecided, disturbed, wandering in the midst of ruins of all sorts that circumstances pile up around us. We can and should remain concentrated on that place where our true blessings are. It is our duty to build our certainties on the base of our faith and thus accustom ourselves to living serenely.

...We will not be able to reform everything; we will not succeed in fighting against all the things that irk us (because often what bothers us is illogical and contradictory); we will only wear ourselves out by wearing other people out. But let's try to tell ourselves, "All of that is trivial, since it must pass." And let us consider all of this from a slightly higher viewpoint. Then the mountains will be lowered, impossible situations will become simple difficulties. Isn't the landscape seen by someone who is walking quite different from that seen by the person who is flying over it? Let's not think that, if we rise above things this way, we are artificially escaping from the closed fields here below; no, faith really teaches us that we are already reigning in heaven with Christ who has entered there as Man-God for us. The only point of view from which we can judge things is God's.

~Mother Marie des Douleurs in Joy out of Sorrow

Dear Lord, Your Ascension brings me such hope and peace. Thank you for such a grand and glorious life, both here and now and forever after. Amen. Alleluia!

Cyril of Alexandria on the Ascension

This is a long reading but one well worth savoring during these days of Ascension tide. I found it in Journey with the Fathers, Commentaries on the Sunday Gospels, Year C, edited by Edith Barnecut, O.S.B. Dame Edith lives at Stanbrook Abbey in England and is responsible for the final version of many of the readings in the Liturgy of the Hours. Her three volumes of Journey with the Fathers are real treasures!

If there had not been many dwelling places in the house of God the Father, our Lord would have told us that he was going on ahead to prepare the dwelling places of the saints. He knew, however, that many such dwelling places already prepared were awaiting the arrival of those who love God. Therefore he did not give this as the reason for his departure, but rather his desire to open the way for our ascent to those heavenly places and to prepare a safe passage for us by making smooth the road that had previously been impassible. For heaven was then completely inaccessible to us—human foot had never trodden that pure and holy country of the angels. It was Christ who first prepared the way for our ascent there. By offering himself to God the Father as the first fruits of all who are dead and buried, he gave us a way of entry into heaven and was himself the first human being the inhabitants of heaven ever saw. The angels in heaven, knowing nothing of the sacred and profound mystery of the incarnation, were astonished at his coming and almost thrown into confusion by an event so strange and unheard of. Who is this coming from Edom? they asked; that is, from the earth. But the Spirit did not leave the heavenly throng ignorant of the wonderful wisdom of God the Father. Commanding them to open the gates of heaven in honor of the King and Master of the universe, he cried out: Lift up your gates, you princes, and be lifted up you everlasting doors, that the king of glory may come in.

And so our Lord Jesus Christ has opened up for us a new and living way, as Paul says, not by entering a sanctuary made with hands, but by entering heaven itself to appear before God on our behalf. For Christ has not ascended in order to make his own appearance before God the Father. He was, is, and ever will be in the Father and in the sight of him from whom he receives his being, for he is his Father’s unfailing joy. But now the Word, who had never before been clothed in human nature, has ascended as a man to show himself in a strange and unfamiliar fashion. And he has done this on our account and in our name, so that being like us, though with his power as the Son, and hearing the command, Sit at my right hand, as a member of our race, he might transmit to all of us the glory of being children of God. For since he became man it is as one of us that he sits at the right hand of God the Father, even though he is above all creation and one in substance with his Father, having truly come forth from him as God from God and Light from Light.

As man then he appeared before the Father on our behalf, to enable us whom original sin had excluded from his presence once more to see the Father’s face. As the Son he took his seat to enable us as sons and daughters through him to be called children of God. So Paul, who claims to speak for Christ, teaching that the whole human race has a share in the events of Christ’s life, says that God has raised us up with him and enthroned us with him in heaven. To Christ as the Son by nature belongs the prerogative of sitting at the Father’s side; this honor can rightly and truly be ascribed to him alone. Yet because his having become man means that he sits there as one who is in all respects like ourselves, as well as being as we believe God from God, in some mysterious way he passes this honor on to us.

~Cyril of Alexandria

Solemnity of the Ascension

When you go to communion during these holy days of Ascensiontide, let your soul abandon itself to thoughts of joy and confidence.

By uniting yourself to Jesus Christ you incorporate yourself in Him; He is in you, and you in Him; and you are before the face of the Father. True, you do not see Him. Yet, by faith, you know yourselves to be in His presence, with Jesus who has taken you to Him. You are with Jesus in the heart's-embrace of the Father, in the sanctuary of Divinity. This is for us the deep grace of the Ascension -- sharing, by faith, the ineffable inner life that Jesus has with His Father in heaven.

~Blessed Columba Marmion in Christ in His Mysteries

And so my heart rejoices,
my soul is glad;
even my body shall rest in safety.
For you will not leave my soul among the dead,
nor let your beloved know decay.
You will show me the path of life,
the fullness of joy in your presence,
at your right hand happiness for ever.
~Psalm 16:9-11

Dear Lord, in You, my joy is complete. Amen. ALLELUIA!

Our Lady of the Ascension

O Mary,
from whom no cloud
but a mist of tears
hid the ascending Christ --
our Lady of Loneliness,
pray for us.

Sister Mary Julian Baird, R.S.M., The Refuge of Beauty: A Book of Marian Poems