Ascension is part of realizing God’s dreams. For Jesus, it was returning to the Father after fulfilling his mission. Fulfilling the Father’s dreams was his passion. Dreams are important, not those that we see when we are asleep, but the ones that we imagine to become, those that we imagine to change ourselves into, those that we plan when we are wide awake. Keep those dreams alive. They liberate us from the destinies that our past or genetics have determined for us. If we think our past defines us, we should know our dreams will liberate us.
The final message of Jesus before the ascension was to preach, preach repentance for the forgiveness of sins. True evangelization is to announce to people that there is a way to get liberated from their sins and their memories. There is a way to ascend out of what sedates them in their ordinary existence and wake up to the dream of God. The ascent.
It is difficult for me to go through the feast of the Ascension without remembering John Climacus’ (640 AD) Scala, the Ladder of Divine Ascent, ever since I read it. It is a thirty-step ladder to reach a life of Christian perfection. The ascent is a journey achieved by shedding weight—renunciation is the key. Renounce what you own, what belongs to you until you have only your body to renounce. The more one is able to renounce, the higher one ascends to the divine realms.
“The Son of God became Son of Man so that the sons of men could become sons of God.” This quote from Saint Augustine absorbs the essence of the descent and ascent of Christ. The descent of Christ shared the human predicaments, and the ascent opened the world of human possibilities, or better say, the divine possibilities of humanity. The credo says, “He descended into the dead,” waking them up to the dreams of God, and he ascended to the Father, offering them the possibility of ultimate liberation out of death.
We are often too closely associated with our mundane experiences, to our real selves, hurrying between tasks and doing rituals of the day with little vision of our ideal selves. The ascension is a time to look up and raise ourselves a little above our ordinary experiences to our spiritual and ideal selves. Our ideal selves are the selves that we should become: it is God’s dream for us, where every one of us should ascend to.
I do not remember where I read this story, but the narrative kept me captivated. A boy climbs up the mast of the ship to replace the torn flag. The ship was caught in the raging sea. He managed to tie the flag. It was time to descend. He looked down and found himself on the heaving mast against the backdrop of the waves that appeared to engulf his ship. He was terrified and could not gather enough courage to look down again and climb down. Then the captain called out to him, “Look up, and feel the steps of the ladder with your feet and come down. Look up…. Look up…” That advice worked well. He gathered his courage to reach the deck. Ascension calls for looking up to heaven, so that we can handle every descent with our gaze still fixed on the ascending Christ.
It is the way to go through the difficult journeys of our lives. To look up above the tempests of our daily lives, to ascend out of what limits our full living. Earth and its cares, the body and its desires are not bad in themselves. But the cares of the body and things that are near and close to us lock us into a certain prison of self-seeking behavior.
Sometimes we identify this small world of ours as the final horizon of lives. The feast of the Ascension invites us to breach the ceilings of our prejudices and belief systems that trap us into our small worlds. Once we break the ceilings, we are able to see the sky of divine possibilities and of living our life in fullness.