December 7th

The Ascension

I am stuck on three small things with this mystery today - and one of them isn't even directly connected. So of course, that's the one really occupying my mind.

When I was at St. Anne's, one of my religion teachers once said, "Think how glorious it would have been to be there, that's why it's in the Glorious Mysteries." I don't know why or what about it made me remember that moment so clearly (except for all the real details of who and where and why). How glorious to see Jesus ascend into the heavens. To see God returning home. To see the promise for us.

So glorious that Luke wrote about it twice, ending the Gospel and beginning the Acts of the Apostles. Neither time in great detail, however. Nothing like the Road to Emaus or the Coming of the Holy Spirit. But it was simultaneously an ending and a beginning, the end of the Follower phase of the apostles' experience and the beginning of their ministry. The beginning of God's grand decision to let us muddle through doctrine and Church policy and how to best spread His Word throughout the world. To leave us alone in the stymy of truth and morality and hope that we remembered the basic tenets of love thy neighbor and could extrapolate the rest out of that.

And normally, that's precisely what I think about. That last in a series of unfathomable choices to our little human minds (also dramatized in a middle school play for St. Anne's once, I believe, or perhaps a story in a homily there - where an angel cross examines Jesus about the decision to leave without having announced Himself globally or even really locally besides about forty people - to have done His greatest work in secret).

But what keeps catching my thoughts is the idea of Doubting Thomas. Because he really got screwed. Like any of the other disciples wouldn't have looked around at the cramped, rundown (I imagine) little room at all the delirious faces so different than the heartbroken ones he had left and thought that they had gone crazy. Like any of us, after we had our heart broken by faith, would immediately embrace it again on the word of grief-stricken fellow cult members.

I wonder if Thomas spent his entire life looking for the Messiah, if he followed Jesus because he thought they would be delivered from Rome rather than death, if he had already weighed and measure half a dozen false messiahs (which were apparently creeping up everywhere at the time) and found them wanting before he found the real thing. If that is why he was one of the apostles. And I wonder if he felt betrayed by Jesus's apparent end, by death touching God, by the end of the revolution he might have imagined. If that was his real crime, feeling betrayed by God because it didn't turn out like he had believed it would. Like he thought the scriptures had promised him it would.

If his real crime was turning away from God who didn't say what he wanted to hear, what he thought he was getting. When God was strange and thus seemed human and small. If his declaration that he would only believe if he touched His hands and side was Thomas's desperate need not to be fooled again.

And what a moment then, when Jesus came to him. To reward even his lack of faith. To show him that it wasn't what he expected, what he thought he knew to look for, what he had thought he had in his hands - it was something better. Even if it was cruel first.

And the Ascension was the decision that no one else would have that moment as literally again, save the visionaries who usually had faith before the visions. And even they would have less of a literal, physical, actual 'touch my hands and side' moment.

And that was a gift too. Because Jesus told us, blessed are those who have not seen and believe. Blessed are those who can believe in a world outside of their heads, who can believe in the word of others, who can see God's plan and accept it as it is rather than trying to figure it out.

Blessed are they who can choose to love God rather than worship at the throne of a divine king. Blessed are those who return from warning family to lay low, from fear and guilt for putting loved ones in danger, and hear the good news that a victory and a blessing beyond their wildest dreams has occured. Blessed are those who can have faith even though it comes from men and women who look mad, even when it has burned you and those you love so thoroughly already, even though nothing in your life has prepared you for what God really had planned for you.

Blessed are we too that the apostles could come down from that mania and learn to speak in tongues, learn to speak to the world itself. Blessed are we that God chose to spread His message through human means, however flawed, so that we could have that great leap of faith - taking a crazy sounding story from the mouth of someone alight with what can be a frightening power.

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. Blessed are they, mad souls.