An Ambiguous Ascent

          Ascension Day, which was this past Thursday, has always left me bemused. Why does our story need a Jesus who zooms up into the clouds after the Resurrection? Couldn’t he just say, “I’m off to join my Father now,” and fade unobtrusively away? I had always imagined the ascending Jesus from the point of view of the grounded disciples, watching perplexed as their Lord took off like a rocket ship. I didn’t think of it from Jesus’ point of view until just this week. As I flew over New York City on Friday, watching the brown and gray tangle of buildings grow smaller and more insignificant as we soared into the sky, my heart ached as I thought about my three young adult children moving around in that labyrinth below, now mere invisible specks of fragile humanity, lost in a vast and complex city. How strange it was to feel the distance simultaneously widening their horizons and narrowing my ability to guide and protect them. There is something about being pulled away by powerful jet engines that has always tugged at my heart, something about breaking through the gravity of attachment to a familiar place or to the dear people who remain in that place, that sets me to longing. Perhaps those feelings of forced separation and loss, of worry and loss of ability to walk alongside us, were what plagued Jesus, too, as he returned to his Father. Perhaps the image of Jesus being pulled up and away from his beloved earth is not such a silly one, after all.

          It is certainly an image that fits with today’s Gospel lesson, in any case. In the Gospel of John, to end his long farewell address to the disciples at the Last Supper, Jesus prays for them. It is part of this final prayer that we read today. Just as I pray for my children as they wander the streets of New York, Jesus prays for his disciples, and for us, “those who will believe … through [the word of the disciples.]” Like a worried parent, Jesus asks God to protect his friends on earth and to knit them together into one body. He knows that we, his followers, are remaining behind in a dangerous world, a world where temptation and suffering lurk around every corner, and as he is pulled away, he asks God to keep us safely in relationship with him. I like the idea of Jesus praying for me, holding onto me across the distance, blessing my daily comings and goings in this labyrinthine world.

The loss that Jesus and the disciples are feeling as Jesus ends his time with them on earth is one that psychologists call “ambiguous loss.” It is not the ultimate loss that we deal with in death, because Jesus has already risen from the dead, shattering death’s sharp finality. After the Ascension, Jesus is absent, yet present. He no longer walks with his friends as a human being, with one set of arms and legs and a voice all his own, and they find themselves on their own once again. Yet he sends them the Holy Spirit to guide and to comfort them, and they feel his loving presence at their side. Theirs is ambiguous loss—loss that pulls and tugs in its hurting, loss that can be lived but not resolved or forgotten. We, too, have many such ambiguous losses in our lives: loved ones who move across the country yet with whom we still talk on the telephone; loved ones who slip away from us into dementia yet remain with us in body; loved ones paralyzed in body and yet still present and sharp in mind; divorced spouses who live separate lives but must co-parent their children; adopted children wondering about their birth parents; loved ones who struggle to share their love due to autism or mental illness; a God for whom we long yet who always escapes our grasp. The list goes on and on. Perhaps our relationship with the ascended Christ can epitomize all of these ambiguous losses in our lives, as we continue to reach out for what will make us whole.

According to my newly-minted therapist daughter, the way to deal with ambiguous loss is not to attempt to resolve it, not to chide its sufferers to move on with life—but to help those who have suffered such losses to develop resiliency, to strengthen them so that they can live with their loss. After listening to my daughter’s explanation, I was amused to watch the disciples dealing with their ambiguous loss in today’s lesson from Acts. Their Lord is gone and their special circle is painfully and tragically broken by Judas’ betrayal. So what do they try to do? They try to fix things, to put them back the way they were before, by filling Judas’ spot in the group. Surely, with the circle complete, then life will feel normal again …? So they deliberate and they draw lots and they pick Matthias. But the funny thing is that we never hear anything more about this new disciple Matthias. He was probably a fine disciple and did quite wonderful work for the early church, but he remains completely insignificant in our story. The solution to the losses that the disciples suffered was not simply to try to fix the brokenness and move on. Matthias was not the answer.

Instead, it is Jesus who provides the real healing of loss in his prayer. When each of my children has gone off to college, I have given each of them a framed family picture to take with them, hoping that they will look at it from time to time and remember who they are, where they come from, and most of all, that they will always be mine, as they begin their lives away from home and begin to make their mark on the world. In the same way, Jesus covers us lovingly with the cloak of his own identity in naming us in his prayer to the Father with the names that God has given him: the names “sanctified” and “sent.” As John writes in chapter 10, Jesus is “the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world.” In our lesson, Jesus prays that we, whom he has sent into the world, may be sanctified, as he is. He directs the Father to make us holy as we are sent into the world to change and challenge it. In Christ, we find our strength. Grounded in Christ, knowing that Christ’s work is our work, too, we know the path that we must take through the losses, perils, and pitfalls of the world.

When we look at the clay or paint handprints that our children once made in preschool, we wonder at how they have grown, and the loss of those chubby baby hands can catch in our throats. At the chapel of the Ascension in Jerusalem, however, there is an indentation on a cracked stone that claims to be the right footprint of Jesus, emblazoned on the stone by whatever divine energy propelled him up into heaven. With Jesus’ prayer ringing in our ears, we contemplate that footprint neither as the mark of a missing person, nor as a sign of the passing years, but as an invitation to place our feet there where Jesus once stood. Jesus’ print becomes the starting point on our mission to walk in his way, to put our communal feet courageously into the huge prints that Jesus’ feet have made in the world, to allow ourselves to be set apart for God’s challenging work, knowing ourselves as the feet of the one who was sent into the ambiguity of our lives.