KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 10 May
That you may know
The Resurrection culminates in the Ascension. It complements an essential insight common to a number of different intellectual and spiritual traditions about the priority of an eternal and everlasting principle that underlies all reality. “Never that which is shall die,” as a fragment from a lost play by Euripides puts it.
The Ascension is the exact opposite to some of our contemporary assumptions. It is emphatically not about a flight from the world. It is the homecoming of the Son to the Father, as Jesus makes clear. And that, in turn, is our homecoming, the making known of the end and purpose of our humanity as found not in the world itself but the world in God. As Thomas Traherne cogently remarks, “You never learn to love the world aright until you learn to love it in God.” The Ascension is the gathering of all things back to God through the going forth and return of the Son to the Father. “We ascend,” as Augustine puts it, “in the ascension of our hearts.”
John Lukacs’ The Question of Scientific Knowledge in At the End of An Age quotes Ludwig Feuerbach, the German radical theologian who influenced Karl Marx: “The old world made spirit parent of matter. The new makes matter parent of spirit.” This is, Lukacs suggests, “as good a summation of the historical philosophy of materialism as any.” He goes on to show rather convincingly that “matter … is increasingly dependent on spirit … that the human mind … both precedes and defines the characteristics of matter.” In his view this is one of the important features of quantum physics. We cannot remove ourselves from the equation about knowing and thinking nature. Or as Neil Postman puts it about the forms of technological determinism, “there is no escaping ourselves.”
The reading from Psalm 47.5 about “God going up with a merry noise” locates the Ascension in the eternal and divine motions of God himself. It is, as the theologians of the Church in the Patristic period put it, “the exaltation of our humanity.” Prayer is really about the lifting up of heart and mind in the lifting up of all things to their end and source in God. It does not negate the physical and material world but signals its redemption in God. This way of looking at reality contrasts with our increasingly virtual world in flight from the real world and ourselves.