It Is Never Too Late
Simone Riva - St. Leo the Great, speaking of the feast of the Ascension, states at one point that “the Son of Man became known in the most sublime and most holy manner as the Son of God when He re-entered the glory of the majesty of the Father and began in an ineffable way to make Himself more present by His divinity, He who, in His visible humanity, had become more distant from us. Then faith, more enlightened, was in a condition to perceive to an increasing extent the identity of the Son with the Father and began to have no more need to touch in Christ that bodily substance, according to which He is inferior to the Father. For while the nature of the body remained in the glorified Christ, the faith of believers was led into that sphere in which they would be able to touch the Only Begotten, equal to the Father, no longer by physical contact but by the contemplation of the spirit” (Discourse 2 on Ascension 1:4; PL 54:397–399).
What the Church celebrates today is one of the most decisive mysteries for faith. Indeed, man is put in the condition of being able to touch without grasping, to possess without having at his disposal, to see without looking, to understand without reducing. The “re-entry into the glory of the Father’s majesty” allows Christ to fulfill His promises by sending the Holy Spirit, a gift through which man rediscovers an often-anesthetized part of himself, the part that allows him a new knowledge of reality, moved by a longing for heaven.
We experience this longing when we become accustomed to a life folded in on ourselves, either because there is something wrong or because life runs smoothly. In either case, everything around us tends to lose interest: relationships are swept away by a veil of formalism that hides the truest part of us, days drag on without a rush that gives passion to time, and life turns into an inconclusive struggle against everything and everyone.
Just when we feel the full weight of the earth, there explodes—if we agree to be loyal to ourselves—the desire for heaven, which, as Fr. Giussani said, “is the depth of the earth. Heaven is the deep meaning, it is the truth of the aldiqua, it is the origin of the aldiqua, the origin of existing, of being, of existence, of the consistency of the path and the destiny of the aldiqua. What we see is the surface of things, is the appearance. What we see is appearance” (Notes from a conversation at the Ascension retreat of Memores Domini, Riva del Garda, afternoon of May 16, 1992).
With the Ascension, the Son of God rekindles in His disciples the desire and the need for the origin of existence, so much so that, as the Gospel recounts, “they returned to Jerusalem with great joy” (Lk 24:52), a sign that this was not a farewell but a cancellation of distances between earth and heaven, between them and their own desire.
We perceive and intuit our true nature, not as a result of a conquest or of just and well-expressed concepts, but of a departure, the one Jesus undertook to take possession of all things and the ultimate destiny of reality.
Giuseppe Ungaretti would say that “the true goal is to depart” (Lucca, 1931). If possession is Christ’s, it can also be ours; if reality is in His hands, it can also be within our reach; if our life is surrendered, it can be fully lived.
The Ascension, by revealing God’s method, unmasks the falsity of the world’s, which instead needs men and women who slowly but surely give up being such by reducing themselves to holding on to reality, perhaps deluding themselves that they can do so by multiplying rules.
Pope Leo XIV, in last Wednesday’s general audience, not surprisingly recalled that “before being believers, we are called to be human.” Only true self-awareness will enable us not to pander to those caricatures of the human by which we are surrounded, to the point of looking up again, to the point of yielding to the allure of heaven, which made the earth vibrate, opening the way to the “contemplation of the Spirit” in whose historical time we are still immersed—a time in which it is never too late to “allow” God to be God, even through some departure.
Notes and translation unrevised by the author.
