IN ASCENSIONE DOMINI
14 MAY 2015
St Mary the Virgin's Church, Buckland, Oxfordshire, photograph by Fr. Lawrence Lew, OP
HINC QUO EGREDIEMUR?
Where shall we go from here? The Lord has ascended from our midst and no living man shall ever see His face until He comes again on the clouds of heaven to judge the living and the dead.
Where shall we go from here but to the ends of the earth in His name? For the Lord has charged us, as he did the eleven, to go forth from this place and proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven to which He has gone to prepare a place for His faithful.
Where shall we go from here but back to His Word? For His are the words of eternal life – a secret now told, once whispers now bold, which proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour. As the eleven recall His words spoken along the way, His Truth and His Life become The Way they must lead us in following Christ to the place where is He gone.
Where shall we go from here but to the consoling embrace of Mother Church; there to await the outpouring of the Holy Spirit as He came upon the apostles in the upper room? For there, in their communion as members of the Body of Christ, He anointed them with His Spirit to send them forth as apostles to all nations. And He sends us forth too, from the same Body of Christ of which we are a part, endowed with the gifts of His Spirit, to live lives of faith, hope and love.
We shall indeed go from here, from this mountain where our gazes first met with our heavenly inheritance, never to lose sight of it but to seek in this life only the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God, so that in the fullness of time we may gather here again, His Body, to ascend with Him to the courts of the house of our God, where He lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.