Christ Church

“He was received up into heaven”

The seventh and last sonnet in John Donne’s cycle of sonnets called La Corona is Ascension. La Corona is a remarkable literary achievement. It consists of seven sonnets which are all closely connected in such a way that they form a crown, a circle, la corona. The last line of each of the seven sonnets becomes the first line of the next sonnet. Thus the last sonnet entitled Ascension ends with what becomes the first words of the first sonnet, “Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.” In other words, the seven sonnets form a “crown of prayer and praise” based on the sequence of creedal and doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. The Ascension marks the beginning and the ending of a perfect circle, a redire ad principia, at once a going forth and a return to God.

Donne’s poetic achievement captures the significance doctrinally of the substantial moments in Christ’s life. The sonnet on the Ascension reflects on the mystery of the Ascension. What is that mystery? It is the homecoming of the Son to the Father in the Spirit having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption. “Salute the last and everlasting day” – such is the Ascension. We are opened out to the homeland of the spirit, our true homeland. The Ascension proclaims our spiritual identity and home; the truth of our humanity is found in God. This is the counter to our worldly preoccupations and yet provides us with the means to live in the world without being defined by its concerns and follies. Such is prayer.

The ancient fathers of the early Church speak of the Ascension as “the exaltation of our humanity.” We are lifted up in Christ’s being lifted up. “We ascend,” Augustine says, “in the ascension of our hearts.” Our humanity finds its truth in God. We participate in that homeland of the spirit here and now through prayer. Prayer signifies all the service that we ever do unto God. In prayer we are lifted up into the life of God. There we place our cares and concerns about others, about our world and day, especially in a world and day fraught with despair and destruction. We place these cares and concerns with God because of Christ’s Ascension.

There is “joy at the uprising of this sun, and son” because he has prepared a place for us. “Nor doth he by ascending, show alone,/ But first he, and he first enters the way.” Donne suggests something of the scriptural tenor of the Ascension as a kind of breaking into heaven. “O strong ram, which hast battered heaven for me” but then in almost complete contrast, Christ is also the “mild lamb, which with thy blood, hast marked the path”, the path for us to follow. The Ascension inspires us to prayer and praise. “Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.” All because he was received up into heaven.

Fr. David Curry
Ascension Day, May 25^th, 2017

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“I came forth from the Father and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father”

Today is known as Rogation Sunday. The days of rogation are days of asking, days of prayer, but with a particular emphasis upon the land. Rogation Sunday reminds us of the redemption of creation itself and our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The resurrection is cosmic in scope. Prayer is an activity of redeemed humanity. We make our prayers in the land where we have been placed. Our places in the land are to be the places of grace. How? By prayer.

Rogationtide embraces the world in prayer. The world is comprehended in the relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. What is overcome is sin, the world as turned away from God and as turned against God, the world as infected and stained by our sinfulness, by our forgetfulness of our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The consequences are our disrespect for the land and the sea, for the world in which we have been placed. We make a mess of it. We forget the place of creation in the will of God; we forget about the redemption of creation.

There are, it seems to me, three competing and contrasting contemporary approaches to our thinking about nature; they are the broken fragments of a more philosophical understanding captured in the Scriptures. First, nature is viewed merely as dead stuff, simply there for human manipulation. This assumes the dominance of our humanity over nature and our complete separation from everything else in the created order. It is a distortion of the Biblical idea of human dominance which emphasizes instead God as the Lord, the Dominus, and thus our dominance only as in the image of the Creator with the strong sense of stewardship of the world which is emphatically God’s world. Secondly, there is the view that collapses our humanity into nature altogether, such as the Gaia hypothesis, but in this view we are simply natural and material forces therefore what we do is natural. This makes it utterly impossible to account for human actions that are so destructive of nature. While it rightly reminds us of our creatureliness and thus a relation to everything else in the created order, it denies the distinctive features of the human creation. The first and second account contradict each other: the one asserting the separation from nature, the other denying the distinctive qualities of our humanity in creation.

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