The Land Called Holy

Ascension 1 May 2008
Chapter Homily - and further thoughts.
Donald

On the 40th day after his resurrection Our Lord Jesus Christ was taken up to heaven.

I got a jolt when I opened a Daily Commentary for Thursday 1st May. The commentary was not on ASCESNSION THURSDAY but on May Day and St. Joseph the Worker.

In Scotland we keep to the 40 days.
What could be more appropriate than to celebrate Ascension Thursday on May Day. The swallows have appeared around the monastery building. Br. Patrick has given the lawns their first spring trim. All is set for a good Ascensiontide.

Someone I know was at the place of the Ascension on the summit of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem for the celebration of the Feast.

He wrote: “To celebrate Ascension, I attended Vespers at the shrine on the summit of the Mount of Olives, and the dawn Mass next morning.

The Chapel/Mosque/Ombomon (neither Cross or Crescent showing) is owned by the Muslims but on the Annual Feast of the Ascension the Armenian, Coptic, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Syrian Churches are each allowed to hold their Liturgies.

Although not in the Koran, the Muslims believe in Jesus’ Ascension but not in his Crucifixion and Resurrection.

The shrine is now but a tiny aedicule, Chapel, which is but a remnant from the Byzantine period Church and of the later Crusader octagonal reconstruction. The Muslim guides like to point out to the Pilgrims/Tourists the mark of the footprint of the ascending Jesus in rock embedded in the floor. Jerusalem Christians in the pre-Constantine period venerated the Ascension in a cave on the Mount of Olives. Fuller details are given by the Irish Dominican, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, who has spent most of his life in Jerusalem, has just published his 5th Edition of his archaeological guide, ‘The Holy Land’. Oxford 2008.

Vespers, led by the Franciscans, extended into a procession, three times round the small octagonal building. As we passed along we were flanked by the canopies or tents erected by the non-Latin Churches. I regret that I did not stay for the rest of the morning and day. It was a golden opportunity to participate in this array of Eastern Liturgies.

To attend the early morning Mass of the Ascension we had to start off at 4.30 am from Via Dolorosa. As we crushed in around the Altar it got very hot. Not surprisingly, some of the group felt faint in the confined space and had to go outside for fresh air. They could then later joke that they almost completed their Ascension.

Vespers and Mass of the Ascension at the summit of the Mount of Olives gave me a sense of how the monastic life itself pivots around the Holy Places. On this aspect of things, it was interesting to hear Prioress Christine, of the Benedictine Convent almost next door, say how impressed she had once been by a paper given by a Bursar of Stanbrook precisely on the theme of St. Benedict’s sense of the sacredness in the monastic milieu. As one theologian has demonstrated, the growing importance of the Holy Land in Christian thought during the first centuries A.D. was associated with the emergence of a SACRAMENTAL THEOLOGY, one that saw the presence of God in his creation, particularly in the land and places made holy by the prophets and, most importantly, by the Incarnation.”

Words of a monk at Latroun, Fr. Augustine’s Homily at the community Mass, brought this thought to the specific feast of the Ascension in the Holy Place of Mount of Olives. He spoke of how, “To grasp the moment of both the Ascension and the Parousia is to contemplate the mystical ladder seen long ago by the Patriarch Jacob, the mystical ladder which has inspired so many commentators including St. Benedict in Chapter 7 of his Rule.(After ascending all these steps of humility, the monk will quickly arrive at that perfect love of God which casts out fear. RB 7:6).

On my way up Mt. Olivet, I was diverted by my interest in the Place where Jesus Wept, Dominus Flevit, but in fact this is on the direct way of ascent to the Place of the Ascension. There could not be a more dramatic expression of the sorrow of Jesus over the destruction of Jerusalem and the joy and glory of His Ascension. There is a great raising of mind and heart in the vision of St. Stephen, “But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God”. Act 7:55

The Ascension, while it is the complement of all our Lord’s feasts, it is the fount of our sanctification. As the Preface of the older Mass proclaimed, “He was lifted up into heaven so that He might make us partakers of His Godhead”. “It is not enough” says Dom Gueranger, “for a man to rest on the merits of our Redeemer’s Passion,
not enough to unite to his memorial of the Resurrection as well.
Man is saved and restored only by the union of these two mysteries with a third: that of the TRIUMPHANT ASCENSION OF HIM WHO DIED AND ROSE AGAIN”.

The powerful attraction of the Holy places still exercises its magnetism. Whether it be example of Egeria reverencing the exposed space of the Ascension in her time, 384, its destruction by the Persians in 614, with the massacre of1207 victims of whom 400 were Nuns of the monastery of Mt. Olivat, or the disincentives of the terrorist age in the Middle East of today, Pilgrims, professed or anonymous, keep coming. The physicality of Incarnation is inseparable from a sense of the sacredness of the place. "No matter how many centuries have passed, no matter where the Christian religion has set down roots, Christians are wedded to the land that gave birth to Christ and the Christian religion." Essential to the living witness of this Middle Eastern (not European) religion, claims Wilken, is the vitality of Christian communities in the land of Jesus' birth. (see, “The Land Called Holy”, R. L. Wilken).

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