Awakenings

by Father Thomas Keating

Celebrations of Jesus' Presence

Chapter 29

The Ascension

While meeting with them, he enjoined them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for "the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak, for John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the holy Spirit. " 
(Acts 1:4-5)

    On Ascension Day we rejoice in the triumph of our Lord Jesus Christ, in his exaltation to the right hand of the Father and the glorification of his human nature. We rejoice also in his invisible coming as a life-giving spirit into our hearts. He goes away, but he comes again. He disappears out of this visible world, but only to reenter it in the depths of every human heart, there to invite us to experience the ripe fruit of his resurrection in the overflowing power of the Holy Spirit. Today the Lord begins to release the divine Spirit in the hearts of those who believe, and we experience the Holy Spirit gushing forth from our inmost being and flowing through our entire human nature. Our thoughts, our emotions, our very bodies are aglow with the divine Spirit. The praises of the living God pour forth upon our lips not just from our own hearts, but from the heart of God himself dwelling within us.

    "To you," Jesus said to his disciples, "is given to know the mysteries of the reign of God." The reign of God is the high tide of light, life, and love that has been unleashed in us by the power of the resurrection and firmly established by the grace of the ascension. It is impossible to overestimate the spiritual power that is now moving within us. "Wait in Jerusalem," Jesus said, "for power from on high."

    "Our God is a consuming fire," the prophet told us. Today we might say that our God is unlimited energy, a nuclear explosion that never ends. It is unlimited because its force is in God, and is God. Divine love is real power, but the very reverse of control or manipulation. It is the power to give without interruption and without end. Like the sun, it never stops radiating energy, light, and life-giving power. Even though everybody closes the curtains to hide the sun, it continues to pour itself out. The sun is a good image of God as a consuming fire. Divine love is the pouring out of light, life, and love without interruption; nor is it the least discouraged by any kind of resistance. It keeps coming.

    What is our response to the grace of the Ascension? Through the readings that prepared us for this feast, Jesus proposes a new understanding of the commandment of love. He had endorsed the Old Testament teaching, which is the heart of all true morality, that we must love our neighbor as ourselves. Now he gives us a new commandment: to love one another as he has loved us, which is something infinitely more demanding. To love our neighbor as ourselves is the highest attainment of human love. But Christ is calling us not only to human love, however noble, but to divine love itself. Divine love is the capacity to love without limit and to go on loving even if all the curtains in the world are closed against us. It is to love our neighbor with unconditional acceptance. To love our neighbor as ourselves is the law of human love. It is the movement of giving and receiving of loving and being loved in return. Hence it is concerned with the reward of love.

    To love as Jesus loved us is to love with Divine Love, with the Love of the persons of the Trinity, which is total self surrender. They love not in order to receive love in return, but because it is the nature of divine love to give, to pour itself out, to surrender, and to do so for no other reason than because it is what it is sheer gift. We too must love not in order to become something, but because we are called to be stewards of divine love; to be identified with it and to be channels for this immense energy, till the world is transformed by Christ and he is all in all. We surrender not because we choose to, but because Jesus has chosen us and commanded us to love as he has loved us.

    When two or more persons love each other, they are united. But those who are called to divine love are called to unity. "Father, they are to become one as we are one." The energy of divine love has been introduced into our hearts in baptism and increased by the Eucharist and by the yearly celebration of the Resurrection. Now, on this Feast of the Ascension, we are invited to enter more deeply still into the mystery of divine life, which is the infinite exchange of divine love. The love of Christ is present in us as immense spiritual energy The Lord Jesus asks us to exercise it and pass it on until it is our whole life. Then he will be all in all in us. He will be what he is--the glorified Christ.

This chapter is taken from the book Awakenings by Fr. Thomas Keating. You can obtain a copy from the Bookstore.  See Awakenings