We’re smack in the middle of them at this very moment, these ten peculiar days on our liturgical calendar. These are the days between the Ascension of Jesus and Pentecost, between the departure (yet again) of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
These ten days make a bit more plain what is always true of this entire Easter season—there’s no neat or tidy conclusion to the Jesus story and Easter itself is full of complex emotions that are not easily named.
Early on in this season we might recall that the risen Jesus still bears the marks of crucifixion—not just subtle hints or merely a trace of scar tissue but grossly obvious marks. Thomas is invited to thrust his hand into the wounded torso of his beloved.
That’s a rather graphic reminder that Easter does not erase the past but invites instead a deeper integration of painful histories for the sake of healing and new life.
So here we are in these ten days—the wake of another absence without any palpable sense of presence.
I’ve come to think of these ten days as in some fashion emblematic of our entire lives as Christian people. We are continually confronting departures while also anticipating the unimagined gifts still to come. This is the story of our whole lives, a story of the inevitable intertwining of love with grief.
That’s not typically how we frame the Ascension of Jesus, of course. Our hymns and prayers for the feast are brimming with images of triumphant glory, of crowns upon crowns adorning the head of our mighty king who now resides in the heavenly realms.
I admit to loving those images and singing them with gusto. But they are woefully incomplete without the texture of loss and the scars that accrue on a long journey.
The lectionary didn’t give us any clear or direct references to the Ascension yesterday, but we did hear about departure and loss. We heard about the disciples lamenting the loss of Judas and the need to replace him with another (Acts 1:15-17, 21-26). We also heard from what is often called the “Farewell Discourse” in John’s account of the Gospel (17:6-19).
This is a touching moment as John’s Jesus prays for those whom he loves and who will miss him terribly when he leaves. These are complex emotions among the disciples and also for Jesus. He is giving himself over to events he cannot control, and he does it for love and with love, knowing all the while the loss that will come with it and thus the grief.
Remarkably, this emotional complexity is not only a key feature in the story of Jesus but also and therefore a vital component of God’s own life, what God feels and experiences, and who God is among us.
I realized some of these complexities in a new way while I was searching for a visual image for yesterday’s liturgy leaflet. My search term was “Ascension,” but one of the images that appeared came from an artist in Islamic traditions. She gave that image the title “The Blue God.”
I suddenly imagined the “blueness” of God who feels both pain and regret, who knows something of loss and of grief, and also the passion to find a path of thriving for the whole creation, no matter the cost.
What an astonishing image of God—of the Blue God—dwelling among us, longing just as we do for the flourishing of life. Perhaps this reorients the fantastical story of Jesus ascending, not up and away from us but up and deeper into the life of God—the God who dwells among us, especially in that most poignant confluence of love and grief, of presence and absence, of regret and yearning.
Modern psychotherapists, like Francis Weller, heartily endorse these emotional complexities. Weller urges us to travel toward wholeness by holding grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. Holding both equally cures our despair and cultivates compassion.
Or as poet and visual artist Khalil Gibran once wrote, “the deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can hold.” He doesn’t mean to glorify pain but rather to invite us below the mere surface of things and into the depths of mortal life; it’s exactly there where God chooses to meet us, those depths into which Jesus ascends.
Hints of these complexities show up in biblical writers quite frequently. I’m so grateful to be using the First Nations Version of the New Testament in this Easter season, which has helped me notice some of those hints more directly. In the first letter of John, from which we also heard yesterday, the writer describes the kind of life Creator has gifted us in Jesus as a life “full of beauty and harmony (1 John 5:9-13).
That word beauty is too often mistaken, especially these days, for glamor and celebrity, for flawlessness, for cosmetic perfection. But for artists of all kinds, beauty nearly always shimmers with poignancy; compelling art seems regularly to retain a lingering shadow; or, we might say as Jesus “ascends,” glory carries with it a tint of blueness.
I am endlessly intrigued by this: mystics in all of the world’s religious traditions quite often experience divine presence as a turquoise, or aqua, or a sapphire blue light.
These ten little days carry quite a weighty glory indeed, with richer insights that I usually tend to imagine. These ten days invite us to see a truly fierce beauty when our exalted loves are wrapped in skins of grief.
Might we suppose that beauty itself is love saturated with grief? After all, we would not grieve as we do if we did not love so passionately. This must surely mark the road toward healing and wholeness: to harmonize these powerful energies in beautiful textures.
I cannot help but think of the Eucharist here, about the space created at the Table for living a life of beauty and harmony, a Eucharistic life of both memory and hope.
The wider world around us offers precious little space for any of us even to name our grief, let alone integrate it into our higher loves. But there’s space the Table. There’s space to hold the worst possible memories—betrayal by a friend, public torture, state execution. And there is also space to cultivate the best possible hopes—the love and grace of God in our rising to new life.
The beauty of the Table, just as the beauty of our lives, emerges as we harmonize such brutal memories with such vivid hopes.
These ten days are for just such a lifetime as that, because I’m increasingly convinced that there is no other path toward healing and wholeness than the one that harmonizes love with grief.
And that is a beautiful thing.
