Ascension & Skulduggery

 

The Christian life, when you think on it, is an ascension, a journey upwards to heaven in Christ. Our architecture proclaims the same, steeples, arches, windows soaring up to heaven like Chesterton's proverbial "flight of arrows."

That said, we particularize and focus the movement in tomorrow's Feast, celebrating Christ's being taken up into the heaven to sit in glory at the right hand of the Father. Yes indeed, our great High Priest who has entered the Holy of Holies in eternity. The veil is torn asunder.

buffoon, mountebank, corrupt, rainbow, malfeasant

Speaking of which, here's our top soldier in a camo mask, because nothing says warfighter leader like a camo mask. Thanks, LL, for the image and I'll resist the heady urge to say what a "mountebank buffoon." In related news, the US Navy's gone hot for a drag queen recruiter. Xi and Putin quake in their boots knowing diversity is our strength and their weakness. 

Do you remember the Ukrainian trans Unicorn Battalion? That did pretty well against, you know, pronoun ignoring weaponry. And go figure, a bullet doesn't care if your pronouns are satanically they/them. Perhaps there's a moral in that, if you care to draw it.

Sursum Corda,

LSP

The Feast of the Ascension

It's the great, and all too sadly ignored, Feast of the Ascension today in which we celebrate the ascent of Christ into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father as our eternal mediator and High Priest. 

Austin Farrer reflects on this upwards movement:

WE are told in an Old Testament tale, how an angel of God having appeared to man disappeared again by going up in the flame from the altar. And in the same way Elijah, when he could no more be found, was believed to have gone up on the crests of flaming horses. The flame which carried Christ to heaven was the flame of his own sacrifice. Flame tends always upwards. All his life long Christ's love burnt towards the heart of heaven in a bright fire, until he was wholly consumed in it, and went up in that fire to God. The fire is kindled on our altars, here Christ ascends in fire; the fire is kindled in the Christian heart, and we ascend. He says to us, Lift up your hearts; and we reply, We lift them up unto the Lord.

And here's today's Collect:

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

God bless,

LSP