In some dioceses the Solemnity of the Ascension is celebrated forty days after Easter, following Luke’s chronology. In other dioceses, it is now transferred to the Seventh Sunday of Easter.
The purpose of this post is not to argue that one of these options is intrinsically better than the other. I would like to take as our starting point that both are legitimate options, which bishops in various regions have chosen for good reasons.
My question is, rather, what effect does the placement of this feast day have upon how well people grasp the meaning of the solemnity itself.
My unhappy sense is that, despite passionate opinions among liturgists concerning when to celebrate, the grasp of the meaning of the feast among the people is currently weak in either case. Ascension enjoys neither a strong theological integration into our understanding of the whole mystery of Easter, nor a strong pastoral functionality in the prayer life and inculturation of the faith community, in families, and in one’s personal spirituality.
What is Ascension good for? What does it mean? Why is it important? Is it important to you personally, to your family, to your parish, and if so, why? I suspect that you could ask the faithful these questions about other feasts of the mystery of Christ — such as Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost — and the answers would come easily.
Ascension? Not so much. And I say this having lived in the Northeast, where it’s celebrated on a Thursday, and the Midwest, where it is celebrated on a Sunday. So I would love to know if there are some places where you find a vital engagement with this feast in its uniqueness — not that it overshadows Easter or Pentecost, but that its celebration has become an event in the liturgical year that the faithful “live from” in some real and definite way. And if this is happening in some places, what does it look like, and what factors have conspired to produce it?
Taking the long view, I have a hunch that Ascension suffered a certain displacement over the last century due to the addition to the calendar in 1925 of the feast of Christ the King. Pius XI instituted Christ the King (an “idea feast”) to combat the rise of secularism and atheism, but Ascension (a much older feast, dating from the fourth-fifth century) was the original feast of Christ the King. Ascension celebrated Christ’s exaltation and the taking of his place at the right hand of God. Now, it seems to me, what Ascension celebrates has become more elusive.
The parish where I grew up was dedicated to the Ascension, and every year on Ascension Thursday, we pulled out all the stops — parish celebration, liturgical splendor, trumpets, even the lighting was special! On the other hand, I can think of years since then, in other places, when the takeaway from Ascension homilies has been a subtle take-down of the Ascension itself. “Why are you looking up into the sky?” became the not-too-exciting message: let’s get on with it. The Ascension itself wasn’t either thrilling or important, it was just another step in getting us to Pentecost.
Yet if the Ascension is in fact something worth celebrating, a “glorious mystery” as the Rosary imagines it, there may be something here that we are missing — and it may make a difference whether it is celebrated on a Sunday or a Thursday, in order to make this meaning come to life today.
What do you think?
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