Ascending to the heart of the Father

Homily
Solemnity of the Ascension
12 May 2013
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
Daily Readings


A blessed Mother's Day to all mom's out there today, from a Church who knows how to celebrate motherhood!  In every Catholic Church around the world, our devotion to motherhood is on display.  Mary has an icon in every Catholic Church I've ever been too.  Every one!  Tons of our Churches are dedicated specifically in honor of the motherhood of Mary. Of all the world's religions, there is not a close second to how deeply the Catholic Church celebrates motherhood.  No one else proclaims a mother to be the most perfect person who ever lived, and the first member of heaven, like the Catholic Church honors Mary her Mother!  No one else dares to claim the unthinkable, that Mary a human person is the Mother of a God that is a Father but who has no Father.  Our Church never stops celebrating Mary as the mother of the Church, the mother of Jesus, the spiritual mother of all of us who receive the gift of eternal life through her intercession, in the same pattern that we received life on this earth through our dear moms!  Happy Mother's Day to all our mothers, living and deceased, from a Church who knows how to celebrate a mother!

Just as Advent must not cave in too early to Christmas, nor Lent to spring break, so also Easter can not cave into the transition into summer, as busy a time as this is for all of us.  Our Easter celebration is not a decrescendo from Easter Sunday to Pentecost, but just the opposite!  The Ascension is a crescendo of anticipation and hope, a last stop before the unleashing of the greatest gift of Easter, the incomparable outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church at Pentecost!  Woe to us if our Easter celebration is waning!  Today in a special way we celebrate that Jesus ascends to the Father taking with him something he did not have before the Incarnation!  He takes back the gift of a redeemed humanity - his Risen and spiritual body ascends to the heart of the Father, from whence the Word first came.  Today we rejoice that just as Christ in the Incarnation and Paschal Mystery filled humanity with his divinity, so today heaven begins to be filled with our humanity.  This my friends, is cause for increased rejoicing!

This joy of ours at our Lord's Ascension is not a fantastically pious and far-fetched hope that one day we too might get to fly around in new dimensions of time and space with spiritual bodies like super-heroes!  This will be great, don't get me wrong!  The little kid in each one of us I'm sure can't wait to try out the spiritual bodies that will be ours in the Resurrection!  Yet there is a deeper joy to be celebrated today, a joy much more real and profound.  The Ascension represents not just the hope of entering the new time and space of a new heavens and new earth, it is an entering more deeply into what makes us most human - our relationships.  What good would super-human spiritual bodies that could ascend and descend and be untouched by death and transcend so many of the limitations we now experience be, if those spiritual bodies were not filled by love and relationship, the things that make us human?  The reality is that without love and relationship, even spiritual bodies wouldn't amount to a hill of beans in the end.  For heaven for us is less of a place and more of a relationship.

For love is our origin, love is our constant calling, and love is our perfection in heaven.

In the Ascension, Jesus ascends most importantly, then, to the heart of his Father.  The Ascension becomes the sacrament then of the most important journey each one of us is making right now, a journey deeper into relationship with the one who knows us the best and loves us the most, our heavenly Father, and through this relationship to enter more deeply into our relationships with one another.  This journey to the heart of the Father, our final home, is more important than the peripheral gifts of the Resurrection - escape from sin and death and the reception of spiritual bodies.  This journey to the Father ensures that our hope in the Ascension is not a vain hope of escaping what it means to be human, but is always a desire to enter more deeply into the relationships that make us most human.  Throughout human history, it is those great saints who have contemplated the heart of the Father on high, to which the Ascension points, who who amazingly taught us how to love one another more perfectly here below.

The promised gift of the Holy Spirit, which comes in all its fullness at Pentecost next week, is here today, sent from the Father and the Son, to lift our hearts and minds in this sacred liturgy, to that place where Jesus and the Father dwell together.  May that Holy Spirit give us increased rejoicing as the Easter season grows stronger, not weaker, and in our contemplation of heaven teach us how to order our lives so as to journey together toward the heart of the Father, where we are destined to live forever.  Amen!  Alleluia!