We are almost at the end of the Easter Season. Next week we will begin the long stretch of Ordinary Time, which will extend from the Feast of Pentecost until Saturday of the 34th Week of the Year. Today, the Solemnity of the Ascension, gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect upon what we have experienced so far as we have journeyed in the heart of Mother Church throughout this Liturgical Year.
We began in Advent, waiting in the darkness of our sin condition for God to have mercy on us. We felt our poverty and weakness, but we found hope in reflecting upon the promise of the prophets, that God would send us a Savior. We rejoiced in the fulfillment of those prophecies as the dazzling light of Jesus’ birth dawned upon us on Christmas Day, and we celebrated throughout the Christmas Season the great marvel of “God with Us.”
After a brief period of Ordinary Time, we entered the Season of Lent, during which we went with Jesus into the desert, seeking by his grace to be purified. We found that, although God has indeed come to us in Jesus, who made the perfect sacrifice to free us from sin and offered us union with the Father, we were unable to make an adequate response to God’s loving gift of self. We were still too caught up in our own selfish desires and attachments. And so we sought to follow Jesus as he made his way through his Passion and Death, emptying ourselves in sacrifice with him, so as to be raised up to a new life.
As we died with Jesus on Good Friday, so we rose again with him on Easter morning! Throughout the Easter Season we celebrated with great joy the new life which he won for us, marveling at his amazing victory over sin and death. We pondered many stories of Jesus’ appearances to his disciples and reflected on the growing life of the early Church.
Today Jesus ascends into Heaven, and so we are given a sort of a pause. He is no longer with us in his physical body, but he has not yet sent the Spirit to us. In today’s Gospel, he tells the disciples to wait in the city until they are “clothed with power from on high.” The next paragraph tells us that the disciples “were continually in the temple praising God.” This gives us an insight into what we are to be doing during this week. We should be “continually in the temple,” praising God for all that he has done in us so far, and preparing for the coming of the Spirit, who will empower us to go forth as witnesses of Christ “to all the nations.”
The “temple” here is the inmost depths of our hearts, where God dwells, and where we come before him in prayer. This spiritual space is also represented by the “upper room” in which the disciples waited with Mary for the coming of the Spirit. We are called into this place during this week, to reflect, as the disciples did, on all that we have seen and known of Christ. We rejoice in the wonder of God’s great love and mercy for us. This joy is reflected in today’s Psalm: “All you peoples, clap your hands, / shout to God with cries of gladness. / For the LORD, the Most High, the awesome, / is the great king over all the earth.” And so we do offer God our thanks and worship, as we come before him in our interior temple. It is important to enter into this joy and gratitude. For we are about to be sent out to share the Good News with the world, but we can only do so effectively if we truly experience it within ourselves as good news. We cannot share a joy which we ourselves do not have.
We know our own littleness and limitations. Left to ourselves we could never be true witnesses of God’s great mercy and love for us in Jesus Christ. But we do not depend upon our own strength. Jesus tells us, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.” And so we wait for the Spirit. This is the same Spirit about whom St. Paul speaks in his Letter to the Ephesians: “May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give you a Spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in knowledge of him. May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call, what are the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe.”
We long for the Spirit to enlighten the eyes of our hearts so that we can know the hope which belongs to our call: our call to enter into the fullness of life with the Risen Lord, and to go forth as his witnesses to all the world. Let us take this week as a retreat, waiting in the temple of our hearts with Mary for a fuller outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost.
During this time before Pentecost, how will I continually praise God in my “interior temple” while awaiting the Holy Spirit? What spiritual insights do I seek from God as I wait with Mary and the Apostles? What selfish desires and attachments in my life need to be overcome by the Gifts of the Holy Spirit?
Excerpt from The Anawim Way, Volume 21, no. 4. More information about The Anawim Way may be found here.