Sermon for: Easter VII B_RCL _ May 24, 2009_Ascension Sunday

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +

Totally unbeknownst to her – at least I think it was; one never knows! – my maternal grandmother Margaret Harker Angell made it possible for me to receive one of the most important gifts of my childhood. Her husband, my grandfather Joe, died in 1939 at age forty-five of heart failure apparently brought on by the effects of being gassed in WWI. My grandmother was an unusual woman. She did two things with some insurance money. She bought a big black Packard – though she did not ever drive. And she bought a little tiny cottage on a beautiful lake in the Laurentian Mountains about 80 miles north of Montreal in a village called Montfort – then a very long way on often torturous roads. There, for the next almost thirty years, she had herself taken in the Spring of every year, and brought back to her flat in Verdun before the snow flew or her wood and coal stove couldn’t keep out the cold. At four weeks old, in 1946, I was taken to Montfort. I spent every summer there until I was sixteen. It is the only physical place I have missed or longed for.

The gift? Well, since I was not a “jock” and temperamentally “out of synch” with most of the other boys, I spent a lot of time alone, quite happily. I wandered the forests for endless hours, and swam or boated on several little lakes, most often with no sounds other than Nature. Lying naked on large rocks heated by the sun, I came to know intuitively that I was integrally woven into the World around me; that It and I were One. And if there was an Energy behind it all, that I was One with It. Later, I would come to know the word “God” to name this Energy – though from that time until now I have waged a long struggle to know the true nature of “God”, and I am not finished yet. But never since those childhood says have I doubted my experience of Oneness with all Being, and with It’s Source, whatever that may be.

The Christian Story can be seen, in one sense, as my story writ large, or my story as the Christian Story writ small . And I think that, either positively or negatively, it is probably true of us all. I liked the portrayal of God the Father as a Black woman in the book “The Shack”; it reminded me of my grandmother and the part she played for me in the search for who I am. In some way, consciously or unconsciously, all human beings are seeking to experience Unity or Oneness with Creation and with the creative Mystery at It’s heart. The Biblical story can be seen as the tragedy of the breaking of that Oneness, and of the estrangement, struggle and suffering that plagues that brokenness. The Gospel Story of Jesus can be seen as a story of the journey towards the healing of the Brokenness. In great simplicity, telling of the birth of God in human form, of His rekindling in His followers their sense of the divine at their very core, of the “Man/God” whose power triumphs over death, it reweaves the shredded threads of human existence back into the great tapestry of Being so that we can see the whole and true picture. The message is clear: in union with “God”, Life is eternal and we are forever woven into that Eternity. By the end of the Story, we are all metaphorically lying on the sun-warmed rocks, conscious of our Unity with all Life and with “God”.

The Church celebrated the next to last step in the basic Story last Thursday: Jesus’ ascension into Heaven. A tough moment for His followers. Having “lost” Jesus to the Cross, and having regained Him and experienced His Life and Love with them again, He tells them He must leave. Why? Because the Unity for which He so earnestly prays in John’s Gospel can only be accomplished in one way: “God” must be woven into and live in each human heart and spirit, for this is the true place where the Divine Spirit and humans are One.

Suzanne Guthrie says, in writing of Ascensiontide, “The Church gives us ten days to practice dwelling in the ambiguous time of the Resurrected Christ vanished, and the Holy Spirit not yet come. In the mystical life, Ascensiontide is the Dark Night of the Soul, the anguished sense of abandonment after a solid period of union. The soul can not cling even to this union. The last threads of attachment must be broken in the darkness of unknowing before the completion of the Christian transformation – being “sent” into the world as bearers of Love. But the mystics testify to a stunning paradox. The abandonment IS the union. It is in the Dark Night of the Soul that Lover meets Beloved and transforming union takes place”. (1)   We remember the words of the Psalmist: “Darkness is not dark to You; the Night is as bright as the Day”.

The sixteenth century mystic John of the Cross, in his poem “The Dark Night” beautifully describes the journey that we metaphorically must take in this Ascensiontide:


On that glad night,
In secret, for no one saw me,
Nor did I look at anything,
With no other light or guide
Than the one that burned in my heart;

This guided me
More surely than the light of noon
To where He waited for me
-Him I knew so well-
In a place where no one else appeared.

O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
The Lover with His beloved,
……
Upon my flowering breast
Which I kept wholly for Him alone,
There He lay sleeping,
And I caressing Him
There in a breeze from the fanning cedars.
………
I abandoned and forgot myself,
Laying my face on my Beloved;
All things ceased; I went out from myself,
Leaving my cares
Forgotten among the lilies. (2)


In the liturgical ten days between Ascension and Pentecost, we follow the seemingly dark path that leads from the sense of being “abandoned” by God to the awareness of our unity with the Divine which cannot be broken - only forgotten. Having been cast out of Eden and an intimate relationship with God, we discover that the place where we walk with God in the cool of the evening is as near to us as our breath. The prayer of the Christ has been affirmed: we are one with God as He is with the Father. And this must translate into the profound sense of our unity with each other. Next Sunday, on the Feast of Pentecost, we will be breathed upon by the wind of the Holy Spirit, in confirmation of the common Life we share with people of every language and nation. Then, sustained by Word and Sacrament and holy Fellowship, so that we might not forget who we are, and leaving our “cares / Forgotten among the lilies”, we take up the mission the Christ gives us – to be bearers of Divine Compassion to each other and to the World.

Alleluia! Not as orphans are we left in sorrow now / Alleluia! He is near us, faith believes, nor questions how: / though the cloud from sight received him, when the forty days were o’er / shall our hearts forget his promise, “I am with you evermore”.  (3)

1. Suzanne Guthrie, on her website “At the Edge of the Enclosure”, for Easter VII
2. John of the Cross, The Dark Night, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh OCD & Otilio Rodriguez OCD
3. William Chatterton Dix (1837-1898) Second verse of Alleluia! Sing to Jesus (#460-461, 1982 Hymnal)