Christ Church

“The end of all things is at hand”

The spectre of “endism” hangs over us – an ominous presence of foreboding and despair in our current age. It is an endemic feature of our fragmented world in the sense of the collapse of cultures and institutions that belong to human flourishing and dignity. This is the dominant form of fear that is with us. A deeper fear than the fear of Covid-19, it is the pandemic of fear itself, a fear of death and of the end of the world. “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper” as T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men puts it, though perhaps with both a bang and a whimper, we fear.

One hundred years ago, in 1922, T.S.Eliot wrote The Waste Land, his poem on the wilderness of modernity. Composed of five sections, the first one is entitled The Burial of the Dead, an explicit reference to the Prayer Book Burial Office. It presents a telling image of a world and church in ruins.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree give no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you,
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The images of death and decay are drawn from the poet-prophet of the Exile, Ezekiel, and from Ecclesiastes, the poet-philosopher of the Hebrew Scriptures. Son of man, ben adam, taken from Ezekiel, alludes to our common humanity and to Christ but also to our uncertainties about life and death. “You” – we – “cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images.” That, too, is from Ezekiel: “and your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken” (Ezekiel 6.4). His world, too, was a world of ruin and fragmentation, of loss and exile on Babylon’s strand.

It all seems so dark and ominous, so negative and dystopian. Yet the poem offers more than despair and darkness, more than fear and death, and again as drawn from Scripture and as belonging to the life of the Church in all times and all places. It is found in the idea of “com[ing] in under the shadow of this red rock,” an allusion to Isaiah 32.1-2: “a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment./And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” The images belong to God and his Providence.

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“God is gone up with a merry noise”

There is something truly celebratory and delightful about Ascension Day. It signals a kind of participatory delight in the movements of God. The Ascension marks the culmination of the Resurrection in the homecoming of the Son to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption. His homecoming to the right hand of the Father celebrates our homecoming, the idea that we have a home, a place with God. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world an, and go to the Father,” Jesus says. The meaning of that coming and going is captured in the Ascension of Christ and belongs to the promise of the gift of the Holy Spirit sent by Jesus and sent by the Father in Jesus’ name. Such is the dynamic of spiritual life.

And there is the wonderful sense of a participatory pleasure and joy expressed by the Psalmist (Ps. 47.5). “God is gone up with a merry noise,/ the Lord with the sound of the trumpet.” It is such a strong affirmation of the divine life which is the ground of all life. Not God has gone up but God is gone up! There is no life apart from the essential life of God. And as we have seen, the Resurrection is cosmic in scope and never lets us forget the Passion in all of its witness to the follies of sin and evil. Ascension bids us rejoice in God, in the motions of the Son’s homecoming to the Father which signals our home with God, our life in the life which does not end.

Ascension reminds us of an important feature of Christian spirituality partly in its Anglican expression. Our liturgy, shaped by a number of different traditions but in this case by Calvin, is very much the liturgy of the Ascension, the liturgy of the sursum corda, the lifting up of all things in prayer to the God who has descended and ascended and has gathered all things back to him from whom all things do come. Prayer is about our hearts in ascension. As Augustine wonderfully puts it, we ascend in the ascension of our hearts, ascendimus ascensiones in cordis. But he adds “et cantamus canticum graduum,” we sing a song of ascent, of degrees, of steps up to the wonder of God, the God who ever is.

In prayer and praise we participate in the life of God. Ascension is the strong reminder of the radical nature of prayer. In prayer we participate in the return of all things to the Father through the Son in the Spirit.

This teaching is marvellously expressed in the very building of Christ Church. It embodies the whole motion of prayer, the motion of the ascension. In the lifting up of our hearts, all things are lifted up to God and by God. Such is prayer in its deepest sense.

“God is gone up with a merry noise”

Fr. David Curry
Meditation for Ascension Day, 2022

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