Ascension

The problem with the Ascension is not that I have nothing to say - it is that there is just so much one can say! I had intended to write a classic sermon on the topic here, but I'm particularly weary these days, what with all my searching for inexpensive frog free zones. So I'll just leave my readers with a few thoughts.

The strength and weakness of the Franciscan Order is the focus on Jesus' earthly life. Raymond Brown once commented aptly that most Christians tolerate only as much of Jesus' humanity as they can stand. True - but not for Franciscans. We emphasise the 'poor child / man' to such an extent that one can easily think that the Incarnation consisted of Jesus' being born and dying. The divine Logos gets lost in the shuffle, even if Franciscans can give all sorts of wonderful sermons about the simplicity of a baby or a mother's agonising at the foot of a cross.

Yet, for all that Francis himself tended to dwell a bit too much on his past sins, Franciscans never did fall into the trap of focussing on hell and our being saved from this. The emphasis was on the Creator - who 'wonderfully created man's nature, and still more wonderfully restored it.' Whatever good came of the Reformation, it is unfortunate that, concurrently, there was far too much stress on salvation as if what salvation meant was not cosmic redemption but being spared horrid torments in hell.

The Ascension is so wonderful - with our seeing human nature glorified, not only through God Himself assuming this but in the ascenscion to the right hand of the Father - that our deification shows us what salvation really means. Yet this, as with many truths of our faith, can only be expressed in doxology. One cannot 'rationally analyse' the ascension. I can just imagine a rationalist saying, "Created and then more wonderfully restored? What was wrong with creation in the first place? Why was it not created right the first time? Why are we still such a bunch of ... trouble makers if we are deified?"

Heaven only knows. Yet, when I say that prayer, I mean ever word. :)

Today is the feast of my 'good friend' Julian of Norwich. I've written quite enough on the site to give those interested a beginning - though I just may get to her a bit more this week. Yet I'll add one little reflection here.

Today, in some schools of thought, reflecting on Jesus' passion, as did Francis and Julian, is seen as rather morbid for 'an Easter people.' (Please! Did he not have to be dead first?) Yet Julian's picture of the suffering Christ, for all that it filled her with a horror of sin, is one of a God taking delight in us - and laughing at Satan's defeat. True, "all shall be well" is reserved fully to the parousia - but is Christianity not a faith that looks ahead to glory as well as back to its manifestations?

Ahhh, Easter people (of the incorrect sort I mentioned earlier - please see Father Gregory's blog for the correct interpretation, and what I assume was my dear friend's first reference to Augustine of Hippo), do not shudder at Julian's horror of sin! (Sin? What is that? Must be a lack of self-esteem!... The eighth capital sin, reserved to our own day, is self-absorption..) In the first manuscript of Julian's Showings, written at age 30 , she, in expressing gratitude for the true contrition (perfect love, self-esteem crowd!), commented, 'what a wretch I am.' Perhaps one needs to be fifty or so rather than thirty to notice that, in the second manuscript twenty years later, Julian has written "what a wretch I was." She is not writing of misery - in fact, there is not a trace of this in the entire manuscript. Julian is a woman in love, writing with gratitude. She had been transformed, bit by bit, by one who is Perfect Love.

Jesus, in his humanity, had taken upon himself fully the vocation to proclaim the kingdom. The sad but inevitable outcome was that, in our blindness and weakness, humanity showed itself at its worst - and he became a target for violence, treachery, betrayal, abandonment by those he best loved. A Messiah dying the cursed death of the 'tree' would be a bit much for comprehension.

Julian's visions, which sparked her deepest transformation and led to her exquisite writings, indeed were of the crucifixion. Yet she had grown so in love that this tortured man who laughed from 'the tree' showed her the Trinity as a warm family, evil as defeated by one who laughed, Eucharistic images, and so forth. She could hear him say 'all shall be well,' because the first stirrings of divine love within us remind us that 'what we have here' is not all that there is. We look ahead to when all shall be well.