Thursday 9th May, Ascension Day
(Contribution for 'Chapter & Verse' in Reform magazine, May edition)
The
ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris tells of a ‘green’ god, born of earth and sky,
a river god in a dangerously overheating world, who offers his cooling waters
to the parched earth. After being brutally dismembered by his jealous brother,
his widow Isis gathers the pieces of his corpse and plants them across the land
of Egypt. Once a king, he has become the soil of the kingdom itself.[1]
However
‘earthy’ our understandings of the incarnation of God in Jesus, the story of
his ‘ascension’ can all too easily undo that earthiness. Having been buried in
the earth, Jesus is not just resurrected (literally, ‘stood up again’), but his
body is ‘taken up’ and away from his disciples. It is easy to find ourselves,
with them, left standing ‘looking up towards heaven’ (Acts 1:11), swept up in a
return to the kind of ‘sky god’ theology that devalues the ‘down here’ in ways
that, as we are now all too aware, have been profoundly damaging in our
relationship with the earth (and by ‘our’, I mean particularly we who are
children of Western modernity).
There
are two pointers in the text to suggest that this should absolutely not be the
case. First, there is the angelic couple who ask the disciples why they
are still standing there and tell them that Jesus ‘will come in the same way as
you saw him go’ (v.11). Second is the promise from Jesus himself of the power
of the coming Holy Spirit (v. 8). There is a continuity between the Jesus they
have seemingly ‘lost’ and the Spirit who is coming, that redirects their
attention somewhere other than ‘up and away’. We cannot think (or preach)
Ascension without Pentecost. The two are one ‘moment’ in the story, just as
Good Friday and Easter Day are one inextricable ‘moment’, even if both such
‘moments’ also contain a hiatus, an uncomfortable ‘in-between time’, that
demands a thoroughly grounded patience, an insistent waiting, a stubborn
‘sticking together’ (that often women, in these stories, seem to be better at
than men).
Contemporary
science and ancient indigenous wisdom both remind us of an ecological
complexity to the world that we modern Westerners have tended to forget. They
also complexify the ‘up-down’ cosmology of the ascension story and its
theological legacy. It might have made sense of the writer to the Ephesians to
declare Christ as ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion’
(Ephesians 1:21), ‘far above’ the oppressive politics of Empire and domination
that the Christians of Ephesus would have known well. But what if the immeasurably
different power of God (v. 19) is more akin to the complex, underground,
connective systems of roots and mycelial fungi that enable the sharing (between
trees, for example) of nourishment, communication, care and wisdom?[2]
An elusive yet powerful ‘undercommons’ that the powers of Empire will never
comprehend?[3]
What
we humans notice as mushrooms are merely the above-ground ‘blooming’ of such vast,
subterranean fungal networks. The mushroom’s caps shelter a whole host of tiny
spores which, eventually, are ejected with huge force (10,000 times the G-force
experienced by astronauts leaving Earth), high up into the air. Fifty million
tons of spores enter the atmosphere every year, following the wind, riding the
currents, attracting water molecules, accumulating into rain clouds, and
finally falling down to earth again in the rain, creating the perfect, damp
conditions for mushrooms to grow…[4]
“be glad, and rejoice in the Lord
your God, for … he has poured down for you abundant rain… I will pour out my
spirit on all flesh…” (Joel 2:23, 28)
Are
we perhaps offered here an ecological parable of a more embodied, more
‘earthed’, Ascension-and-Pentecost? Instead of searching for some distant
heaven, why don’t we learn to sing and dance in the rain, in the outpouring of
the Spirit on all flesh? Instead of standing looking up for the Jesus we think
we’ve lost, why don’t we look downwards, following the loving gaze of the one
who ‘has put all things under his feet’ (Ephesians 1:22), and who reminds us
that the place on which we are standing is holy ground (Exodus 3:5).
[1]
For more, see Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred
Masculine (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2022), pp.120-4.
[2]
See. e.g. Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds,
Change Our Minds, And Shape Our Futures (Dublin: Vintage, 2020).
[3]
See Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons [FINISH REF.]
[4]
See Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand, pp.11-12.
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