Holy Mary, Mother of our hope, Mother of the Holy Eucharist, lead us to Jesus truly present in the Holy Eucharist,He who is our Hope. Help us to give our hearts totally to Him in adoration, trust and love. Obtain for us the grace to live out this gift of self in our daily lives, showing our love for God for the entire world to see, thus becoming instruments of hope for the hopeless. Amen.

The Ascension of Our Blessed Lord. Sunday May 17th, 2015

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Ascension of the Risen Lord Jesus, to the right hand of His Father in Glory. Yet, if you think about it, this seems to be a contradiction. After all, didn’t Jesus just say in the Gospel we just heard, “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” So, if Jesus ascends into heaven, how can He be with us until the end of time? If Jesus wanted to be with us until the end of the world, how come he didn’t just stay in Jerusalem and be available to everyone there? If he truly loved us, why didn’t He stay in person so that we could encounter Him, experience Him in person just like his disciples, and see Him, touch Him--hear Him? These are good questions. How can we answer them?

In our own lives, we can certainly feel as if Jesus has left us alone, especially when we experience bad things, like an physical or mental illness, addiction, the death of a loved one, or a personal tragedy. But as well, we can seem abandoned by Jesus, our God, even in the everyday struggles of life. In just ordinary life we can often experience sadness or loneliness, or sometimes even incredible anguish. I believe the apostles and disciples of Jesus felt many of these things, especially after Jesus was cruelly crucified, leaving them alone both through the stark reality of his death and then later apparently, through His bodily ascension into heaven.
So how did the disciples overcome their anguish, and how do we overcome our own? Where lies our hope in this life? Well, the answer is simple, yet hard; but the Ascension of our Blessed Lord gives us the answer. The Ascension points to our hope. This is why during the Holy Rosary, we pray for an increase of the Virtue of Theological Hope as the fruit of the second Glorious Mystery—He ascended into Heaven.

After the Ascension, the Disciples trusted in Jesus’ words, in His promise. They believed in faith that even though Jesus was with the Father in heaven He was at same time still truly with them. And not just spiritually with them, or with them in their memory or in their heart, but they believed without a doubt that Jesus was still on earth personally, physically with them, in His resurrected albeit now glorified human body (that’s right, physically). This brings up one of the grave mistakes that I think many Christians can make in their understanding about Christ’s ascension into heaven.

The mistake is to think that Jesus is no longer physically with us here on earth. When we think of the ascension, we can wrongly picture Jesus standing before the apostles and then floating up into the clouds disappearing from their sight, leaving earth until His second coming. But this is not what the language of the Gospel means. We have to understand the words of today's Gospel mystically because they are speaking of great mysteries.

Mystically speaking what does it mean, as we are told in today's Gospel, "and He was taken up into heaven."? Well first of all Heaven is not a place up in the sky somewhere beyond the clouds or beyond the stars at the edge of the universe; nor is heaven some type of other dimension or parallel universe; heaven is not the stuff of science fiction. Heaven is all around us because God is all around us.

There is however, a veil that separates heaven from us. Heaven goes beyond our senses; even though it is all around, it transcends our ability to see it, touch it, taste it, hear it or smell it. Yet is more a reality around us than that which we can sense…Remember, we believe in what is invisible!

To be taken up into heaven means then to enter through that veil that separates heaven and earth; it is to go beyond our sense perception and behold that which we can only see now through the eyes of faith and experience through faith. To be taken up into heaven is to behold that reality above all other realities which no eye as seen, no ear has heard nor has never even entered into the mind of man. It is to experience that God who in His divinity is all around us, to behold Him and see Him, see Him face to face. It is to become one with Him in an eternal union of unending Love. Heaven is then, the ultimate reality all around us, more real than what we can experience with our senses.

At His ascension then, Jesus in His human resurrected body enters through that veil and becomes the way, in fact the only way, for us to enter through as well. And so Jesus' humanity has become a type of doorway, if you will, between heaven and earth. And so where He has gone in His human nature we can also now hope to go with Him, in Him and through Him. He is, in His human nature, human body, the Way. And by the way, we can enter into heaven with Jesus, in Him and through Him not only at our death but through faith beginning already here on earth; this is our hope that we already possess.

Because of the ascension, and the sending of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost to the Apostles, who were the first priests (which we will celebrated liturgically next week), Jesus' Human nature, human body can now be present both on earth and in heaven at the very same time. And so, in His Human nature, in His human Body, Blood, and Soul, still united to His Divinity--heaven and earth become one for us.

The fact of the matter is, and this is very, very important to understand....the fact of the matter is, Jesus is still on earth as He is in heaven. And where do we experience Jesus on earth as He is in heaven? In the Holy Eucharist of course. The Eucharist is truly our Resurrected and Ascended Lord in the flesh; and so, in the Holy Eucharist, heaven and earth literally unite. Where Jesus is there is heaven, and the Holy Eucharist is Jesus; hence where the Holy Eucharist is there is heaven!!! And so, when we are in the presence of the Holy Eucharist we are at the same time both on earth and in heaven; in fact we are more in heaven than we are on earth—this is the great feast, the great truth and the great reality we celebrate today!

Because Jesus is still with us on earth, physically and personally present in the Holy Eucharist, we discover that this is our hope in the present life of struggle and fear. But we must believe with our whole hearts and minds that He is really there in the tabernacle and on our altars after the words of consecration are spoken. And we must, we must, if we are to possess hope, practice that belief by adoring Him in the Holy Eucharist, falling on our knees and crying out in love, "Oh my God I believe, please help my unbelief and begging pardon for those who don’t believe, so don’t adore, hope and trust and so don’t love.

We must also allow our encounter with the Eucharist, Jesus, to transform us in Love, to change us. For this to happen, we must struggle to trustingly and lovingly give our hearts, ourselves totally to Jesus, He who gives His Sacred Heart totally to us in the Holy Eucharist. We must lift up our hearts; in other words, offer our hearts to Jesus with total trust. Jesus I trust in you, now please help me to trust you in order to give myself and all that I am to you in love, so as to be united to you in love and through you to the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit…for this union is really what heaven is all about, a union for which each one of us has been created to partake.

In our present situation in which so many are losing hope, in which suicide is literally epidemic, let us turn to Our Lady for help…Holy Mary, Mother of our hope, Mother of the Holy Eucharist, lead us to Jesus truly present in the Holy Eucharist,He who is our Hope. Help us to give our hearts totally to Him in adoration, trust and love. Obtain for us the grace to live out this gift of self in our daily lives, showing our love for God for the entire world to see, thus becoming instruments of hope for the hopeless. Amen.