In a parish I served at one time, I had the privilege of visiting a most engaging woman I’ll call Eleanor, who had been married for sixty happy years to Herbert, a well-respected doctor. They shared a deep Christian faith. She had been widowed for several years and was well into her eighties when a broken hip landed her in a convalescent home for several months. It was hard work to regain her strength, and the situation in the convalescent home wasn’t always pleasant, but she has a wonderfully clear mind and even temperament, and she is patient with herself and other people. And having her family visit helped a great deal. “My Suzy has been in today,” she’d tell me, “and my grandson Joey with his little girl.”
But one day, after she’d recounted who had been by to visit, she startled me when she said, “But why haven’t I seen Herbert? All the years we’ve been married, never apart for a whole day, but he never comes here to be with me.”
I paused, then asked gently, “Eleanor, how many years now has it been since Herbert passed away?” She looked me in the eye and replied evenly, “Four years.” I knew then that she had not lost touch with hard reality, but that she was speaking from her spiritual conviction that love never ends, as the scripture says, that love is stronger than death.
My mother died from lung cancer twenty-five years ago at the age of sixty-two. My sister and I were there in California when she died, and two of her sisters flew in to see her. But her youngest sister, Margaret Mary, wasn’t able to travel from her home in New York.
A bit of background: In my mother’s family communication was sometimes at a slant, indirect, and what was not said could well be more important than what was said. Maybe it was the Irish. On top of that, her sister Margaret seemed to have had what people call a sixth sense — she seemed to see things or know things ahead of the data, if you get my drift.
At the hospital in California, my mother’s passing was easeful; like a sunset, I thought. A few weeks later, I was back on the east coast speaking with Aunt Margaret about all that happened, when she told me in her matter of fact way that, at the hour my mother died, she, my aunt, sitting alone in her bedroom in New York, saw her. Not as she was at that hour in California, but as she had been many years before, when she was eighteen or so: young and beautiful, smoothing her hair into place with one hand. My mother was standing on a pleasant grassy hillside, at some distance, so that she had to shout to be heard across the divide: “Tell them I’m all right,” my mother shouted to my aunt. Tell them I’m all right.
Then my mother turned, my aunt said, toward a small child who was sitting in the grass nearby her, none too happy. My mother seemed to indicate “I have to take care of this now.” And then she went to that child as though to begin — or resume — something important. Then it was over; Aunt Margaret was again alone in her room.
Now, there are a few ways to understand this. On the one hand, a psychologist might say that Aunt Margaret was trying in her way to console us; to reassure us that our mother was all right, and maybe to tell — and at the same time to not tell — some family secret. Talking Irish, you might say. On the other hand, well, maybe she saw what she saw. It couldn’t have been more exactly like my mother.
In either case, given the spiritual freedom in the way Eleanor and I were talking about Herbert, when I told her about my mother, we wondered aloud if in fact, Herbert, that good doctor, might be occupied with some important work now — some special healing assignment to do for the good Lord. Eleanor entertained that possibility for a while; his work always had been God’s work. All the same, she concluded, I want to see him again.
Today we hear the Biblical account of the Ascension of Jesus into heaven, body and soul. Just now the story was read from the New Testament twice: first from the Acts of the Apostles, then from the gospel of Luke. Actually, they are two variations of the same account, as those two books were written by the same author.
The Ascension is integral to the overarching story of the Resurrection that we remember during the fifty days between Easter Day and Pentecost — how first Mary Magdalene encountered Jesus in the garden on that Sunday morning; then Peter and John and the others saw him that night in the upper room; then some of them met him on the road to Emmaus when he broke open to them the meaning of the scriptures; then they recognized him by the lake when he broke the bread and gave it to them. Seeing him in these places in these ways convinced them that, although he was changed, he was alive! Therefore, what he had taught them also was alive, and what he meant to them: living and true and trustworthy.
And then — as though he had still more work to do in another place — he turned from them and went back to the Father from whom he had come. In Luke’s accounts, this happens in full sight of the disciples. You could say Luke was what a film critic might call ‘a magical realist.’ Like my Aunt Margaret.
But if you were inclined to more of a psychological reading of the Ascension, you would find another interpretation in the gospel of John. In John’s gospel, it is as though the dying and rising and return to the Father were all one event, and the meaning of it all was the glorification of this son of God — his lifting up — so that all living beings might be drawn up with him into glory, into grace upon grace.
In his gospel, John wrote an extended passage that people call ‘the farewell discourse’ in which Jesus teaches the disciples before he died about the relationship among himself and the Father and them. (John 14:1—16:33) The Father is in me, he says, and I am in the Father. Everything you have seen in me is communication from the Father to you. And now, I’m going home; you can’t come with me yet. But in my Father’s house there are many rooms, and I go to prepare a place for you. And I will send my Spirit to abide among you here; in the Spirit I will be in you and you will be in me forever, and we will be together in the hidden life of God.
Either way you read the Ascension, realistically or psychologically or, for that matter, both ways at once on different levels, to both Luke and John, it is a pivotal point in the Resurrection story. For Jesus leaving them is the condition of possibility for their receiving the Spirit in themselves, as a community. As long as he was there, they were dependent on his presence, his words, his actions. When he was gone, they were thrown back on themselves and had to find his life within their own souls, and amongst one another in the community that carries his name. It was as though Christ now was in them to keep, like the vine is in the branches — the life of their lives. Now, what was revealed of God would depend on their presence, their words, their actions.
Love and loss; attachment and separation — Psychologists tell us that these are the events that form our identities. We are who we are because of whom we love and whom we have loved; we know ourselves to be individuals because of the inevitable separations from those loved ones. Similarly, the community that became the church was formed by love and loss of Jesus and his Spirit abiding with them because they gathered in his name.
And so it is even to this day in the community we call church. EMMANUEL. As Jesus said, we who are companions on the way, who break bread together time and again, come to dwell in one another. I live in you, you live in me and all the others; we abide together in the One in whom we live and move and have our being. We share life: that’s what holy communion is. Therefore, even when one must move on, something of him or her remains within us, among us. As my friend Eleanor would readily say, we have shared one body, one spirit, and, once having loved one another — we have it on the best authority — love never ends, even to the end of the ages.