High Apple Pie In The Sky Hopes

I really do love Ascension Thursday. Jesus is King over all the earth, the Lord of all creation, seated at the right hand of the Father! How much better could it get than knowing our Lord is coming again in power? And the promise of the Holy Spirit…it’s emotional for me. A sad goodbye that isn’t really a going away (He is with us to the end of the age); the promise of a Comforter Who will give us strength and guidance as we strive to live Christ-centered lives. It is the promise of the Kingdom: if Jesus is always with us, and yet at the right hand of the Father, then the Kingdom is already appearing, already here, already an active force in our lives. God is with us as brother, ruler and friend. God is with us!

I decided to celebrate the holiday at a downtown high Anglican parish, mostly for its liturgical style but also because I didn’t know of any other Anglican church (or Roman Catholic, for that matter) observing it.

I wavered a bit about going – I should really go home and work on my papers, and there’s also that homeless guy who hit on me – but in the end I decided I’d rather pray than regret praying and spend the next several days ardently praying for forgiveness for my lapse in prayer.

I’m glad that I went. It was a beautiful service, with a beautiful procession and the ritual that I have always loved. I felt connected to God, lifted up, fully enveloped in the moment. It’s something like being in a bubble.

I was also glad to see a women deaconing; I knew this church was beginning to do that, but for some reason I didn’t think I’d ever get to see it. After the service, I got to speak to her: I know her from other social situations, and I like and admire her. It’s one of those admirations that leaves you not entirely certain of what to say or how to act, since there are multiple social layers to navigate and they don’t all match up…it can be hard to know what level of admiration to express and what to conceal for fear of looking like some kind of deranged stalker.

She said that she was hoping she’d see me there. That made me feel happy, for complicated reasons. For starters, it’s not a church I normally go to, so hoping to see me means anticipating that I’ll want to spend holy days at a strongly liturgically rooted church, which itself implies knowing me pretty well. It’s also just the feeling of having someone – anyone – actually wanting you to show up at church. And I don’t mean the kind of ‘happy to see you’ that follows any new-ish parish face, a kind of impersonal hope projected outward on anyone who might keep the parish going another generation, the impersonal hope that only ever occurs to you to feel once you notice the person is already there. Advance hope…I have not been privileged to experience that since leaving my Roman Catholic parish. Actually, on certain occasions, they do still look forward to seeing me, and are genuinely glad to see me when I come.

In a way, going to church on Sundays makes me feel a profound sense of loss. It really is true that I gave up my family to strike out and follow God, a wrenching and heartbreaking decision whose experience has not been easy to express. I miss belonging, really belonging, to a congregation. I miss having a home. I miss being able to go to the same place to celebrate everything. I miss the familiarity of the liturgy and the freedom of being able to let myself go in it instead of always trying to figure out what page of what book we’re on. I miss being able to serve Mass in languages I don’t understand because it’s the same everywhere.

I am longing for my Comforter to come. In a way, I’m living in Ascensiontide, the time between Ascension and Pentecost. I have known the joy of the risen Lord, and yet I feel a profound loss and emptiness, inhabit a time in between when I have not yet been given the power to carry out my Christian duties, my mission. I wait in hope, and also in fear, for the coming of the Spirit, in Whom I will find everything I need to keep working for the Kingdom of God. I am in between the comfortableness of knowing exactly where I am (beside the risen Jesus) and the exhilaration of feeling the Spirit moving discernibly in my life, revealing to me the shape of the Church in a way that I can feel like I belong in her, like I am at home in her, and even perhaps that I am contributing to her with my own special gifts.

But the time in between is like being holed up in a room, stifled, unable to breathe or think straight, unable to discern where I really am, afraid of being found out or evicted, afraid of the mob, of the unknown future. It is the difference between being a sojourner and a citizen, being a guest and family.