Ascendit Deus in jubilatione…. God is ascended with jubilee, and the Lord with the sound of the trumpet. Alleluia.
Your Excellency,
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
My Very Dear Sons,
We contemplate today a reality that might seem quite “out of this world,” because it truly is. The Lord, having accomplished the mission set before Him by the Father, returns to the place from which He came, if we can speak in such terms in reference to a Divine Person. He leaves in order to blaze the trail for us. He does not leave us orphans or desert us. He promised this.
One of the characteristics of our time is the tendency to want to keep everything here below. Even Catholics, including prominent theologians, have expressed acceptance for this focus on the “here and now” in contrast with what seems to them a false “other-worldliness.” Why preoccupy ourselves with a theoretical Heaven “up there,” they ask, when we should be tending to the many urgent social issues that surround us? This idea, although containing a grain of truth with respect to our duties in this world, is alien to the true teaching of the Church and the supernatural hope of a better world that animates it. This spiritual myopia of an entirely earthbound perspective explains many things about the lives of our contemporaries and, perhaps, about our own lives as well.
In his book, published a few years ago in the United States, The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times, Dom Jean-Charles Nault, of Saint-Wandrille Abbey in France, speaks of a destructive train of thought well know to the monks of Egypt in the early centuries of the Church. Often around midday, the monk would grow tired of reading and praying in his cell and would give in to this thought to the point of breaking the monastic rule and going about outside in order to find someone to chat with. This seems innocent enough but denoted for the religious vowed to perfection the beginning of a very evil path. This bad tendency, this sinful attitude was called “acedia.”
Something similar, explains Abbot Nault, is happening on a vast scale in our day in Western society. A whole world is bored with life and is heading for great evils. He writes:
Every human being is created “in the image [of God], after [his] likeness (Gen 1:26), and therefore feels in the depths of his soul an aspiration to the infinite, a desire that God alone can satisfy. Regrettably, very often he tries to satisfy that infinite desire with a series of goods or pleasures that in reality only exacerbate that desire and, ultimately, cause sadness and bitterness. Even in the case of someone who knows, by faith, that God alone can satisfy that desire it sometimes happens that the infinite distance that separates the creature from the Creator plunges him into discouragement or even despair. For God remains on the heights. He is immensely great and far above us. That is man’s first experience….That is when something unexpected and unimaginable is revealed to us, which delivers us definitively from acedia: God bends down to the lowly. He sees us, he sees me. God’s look upon the lowly is more than a simple look: is it also action. The fact that he sees me, that he looks at me, transforms me, just as it transforms the world around me…God humbles himself in order to raise me up. (Ignatius Press 2015, p. 195)
We have here a precious insight into the mystery of the Ascension: Our Lord’s wonderful departure, before the very eyes of His disciples, His Ascension, although a past event now in terms of History, remains nevertheless in a mysterious way to invite us to think upon what is heavenly and lasting. The Ascension is thus a powerful antidote for that particular sort of boredom and despair that grips so many of our contemporaries, especially the young. By simply following Our Lord in prayer, as He rises above earthly things, we can fight against the evil effects of acedia, the “Noonday Devil,” as the monks were used to calling it, quoting Psalm 90.
Perhaps, though, we need a little encouragement. Perhaps we are a little afraid to follow the Lord up there. Our new Sovereign Pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, leads us in the direction of that higher place. In his address to the participants in the jubilee of oriental churches on May 14th, he said:
We have great need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in your liturgies, liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder at how God’s majesty embraces our human frailty! It is likewise important to rediscover, especially in the Christian West, a sense of the primacy of God, the importance of mystagogy and the values so typical of Eastern spirituality: constant intercession, penance, fasting, and weeping for one’s own sins and for those of all humanity (penthos)! It is vital, then, that you preserve your traditions without attenuating them, for the sake perhaps of practicality or convenience, lest they be corrupted by the mentality of consumerism and utilitarianism.
Your traditions of spirituality, ancient yet ever new, are medicinal. In them, the drama of human misery is combined with wonder at God’s mercy, so that our sinfulness does not lead to despair, but opens us to accepting the gracious gift of becoming creatures who are healed, divinized and raised to the heights of heaven.
Imitating the Blessed Virgin and the Apostles and Disciples, may we enter into the lifegiving beauty of Christ in His Wonderful Ascension, repeating with the holy liturgy:
God is ascended with jubilee, and the Lord with the sound of trumpet. The Lord is in Sinai, in the holy place: ascending on high, he hath led captivity captive. Amen. Alleluia.
