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!