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

Palm Sunday Wisdom

Tomorrow's Palm Sunday and it always seems, liturgically, to be a bit of a double cross. We welcome Christ as King, Hosanna in the highest, and the next minute it's Crucify Him. But it's in the Passion that Christ's kingship is revealed.

The late Fr. Crouse puts it well:

"Are you a king then?" asks Pilate. Yes, he is a king. "Thou sayest it." Yes, he is a king. But kingship is not what Pilate thinks it is; not what the world thinks it is. Yes, he is a king: "But now is my kingdom not from hence, if it were, then would my servants fight...but now is my kingdom not from hence." The ways of God's Kingdom are not the world's ways, and the glory of its kingship is altogether different. Its kingship is the kingship of a servant, its liberty is the liberty of free obedience; its virtue is humility. "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." That is the essential message of this day.

Its virtue is humility or blessed are the poor in spirit. Theirs, we learn, is the kingdom of heaven. By the grace of God.

Defeat the Turk,

LSP

Civilisational Fail and St. Francis

A Typical View From The Compound

Via ZeroHedge: "Civilizations fail when their elites change from an admired dynamic creative class to a despised Establishment of corrupt rentiers, an entrenched governing class unfit to govern."

Are we there yet? As you ponder that, here's the Collect for the Feast of St. Francis:

St. Francis of Assisi

MOST high, almighty, and good Lord: Grant thy people grace to renounce gladly the vanities of this world, that, after the example of blessed Francis, we may for love of thee delight in all thy creatures, with perfectness of joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Of course Francis turned his back on the elite status he'd inherited and chose a different path. Not for him the life of rentier 1% luxury. As I understand it, the first Franciscan friars to arrive in England were arrested for vagrancy.

Carry on,

LSP