What the Ascension Means - The Catholic Thing (2025)

Stephen P. White

Thursday, May 29, 2025

It is easy to think of Heaven as a merely spiritual reality in which we are free from the physical toil and sorrow of this earthly life. But we never ought to forget that Heaven is for bodies, too. We look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Today’s feast of the Ascension is a particular reminder that we ought to see our own bodies – and use our bodies – with such an eye toward higher things.

We humans don’t make any sense without our bodies. Sure, we can imagine ourselves (and unfortunately many people today do so imagine themselves) as a mind or spirit or “consciousness” trapped in a meat-machine.

Our bodies, we tell ourselves, have no more intrinsic meaning than any of the rest of vibrating matter that makes up our world. All this stuff only has so much meaning as we give to it. Accordingly, we imagine ourselves at liberty to manipulate and use all this mere stuff within such ever-expanding limits our technology, or the market, will allow.

The misery caused by this way of seeing ourselves and our world is incalculable. This sort of disembodied ethos even crops up in certain corners of Catholic moral theology wherein the concrete nature of acts is diminished or denied and all that we are left with for distinguishing good from evil is intention.

It is a tempting path, one which grows more tempting by the day as our power to manipulate the material world increases. It is also tempting in that it requires no up-front disavowal of God or spiritual realities, only a denial that matter comes with its own built-in meaning. Deny the Creator or deny the nature of his Creation; it’s all more or less the same to the Devil, who really doesn’t care so much if you’re actually an atheist so long as you act like one.

“The truth,” as we read in Gaudium et Spes, “is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.” This mystery of the incarnate Word includes more than the moment the Word became flesh in the womb of Mary. It encompasses more, even, than the birth, life, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The Ascension, too, is part of the mystery of the incarnate Word.

In the words of St. Augustine, “The Resurrection of our Lord is our hope; the Ascension of our Lord is our glorification.”

If the mystery of man takes on light only in the mystery of the Incarnate word, then the Ascension tells us something fundamental about our own humanity and our own bodies. Jesus Christ, true God and true man, retains the fullness of his human nature. Yes, Christ’s body is resurrected and glorified. But the body that rose from the grave, the body that still bears the marks of the Crucifixion, this same body ascends into Heaven. Christ takes his place at the right hand of the Father, not by shedding his body, but with that same body.

In the words of Pope St. John Paul II, “For all eternity Christ takes his place as the firstborn among many brethren: our nature is with God in Christ. And as man, the Lord Jesus lives forever to intercede for us with the Father. At the same time, from His throne of glory, Jesus sends out to the whole Church a message of hope and a call to holiness.” Because Christ, who shares our nature, sits on the throne of glory, the horizon against which we understand our own lives and our own bodies, has been irrevocably altered.

That is the Church’s “message of hope”– a share in Christ’s own glory – but how is it, as John Paul II said, “a call to holiness?” Does he simply mean that holiness is the condition and path by which our hope is realized? Undoubtedly, yes. But there is more to it than an exhortation to upright living for the sake of attaining the promise of Heaven.

To see this more clearly, let us return to St. Augustine, who encourages us, in celebrating the Ascension, to “ascend with Him and ‘lift up our hearts.’” Augustine continues:

But let us not while ascending be lifted up, nor presume upon our good deeds as if they were our own. For we ought to “lift up our hearts,” but “unto the Lord.” To lift up the heart, not unto the Lord, is called pride; to lift up the heart unto the Lord is called taking refuge. For it is to Him that ascended that we say, “Lord, Thou hast been our refuge.”

It is pride to take refuge in anything less than God. It is pride and presumption to take refuge in our own deeds, or to see our own feeble efforts as a limit on God’s grace. Pride often comes in the form of thinking too much of ourselves and our own merits. But pride can also take the guise of false humility which presumes to know the limits of God’s grace. It is pride which leads men to say, “We will make ourselves like gods”; it is a different species of pride which leads men to say, “God cannot make us like Him.”

The Ascension of “one who shares our nature” to the throne of glory ought to remind us of the destiny for which we were made. It ought also to shatter our presumption to know the limits of what God can make of man. Let us never be content with less than what God promises through grace. Let us never cease to remind the world of what the Ascension means.

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