Rising Above It All
When we say our Rosary and meditate on the individual mysteries of Christ’s life, death and resurrection, we sometimes forget to step back and observe the bigger picture, missing out on some of the great messages the Rosary has to offer. And because the Rosary’s fifteen mysteries are so intimately connected with the joys and sorrows of our own lives, we also risk failing to absorb the lessons that can make sense of who we are and how we’re supposed to act.
The feast of the Ascension helps put things in perspective and gives us one of those big “life lessons” that help us find our way through this vale of tears. It’s not all tears, mind you. There are joys mixed in with the sorrows of life, and consolations in the midst of our tribulations. Joys and sorrows—it’s the message of the Rosary, and the story of our own existence. But surely life is far more than a mere succession of happy and sad events? Surely, God has more in store for us than in merely enjoying or enduring one darned thing after another? The truth is, the roller coaster of life actually is more than just ups and downs. And if we faithfully follow our blessed Lord, it will end, literally, on an “up note.”
Today, the feast of the Ascension of our Lord into heaven, Christ rose up. He did so partly to show us that our souls, and eventually our bodies also, are also meant to rise up after death, rise far above the petty highs and lows of this life. I remember back in the early days of my priesthood, when I used to commute between the north of England and the French Alps. As we came in for a landing at Geneva, I’d look down on the mountains and valleys as we flew far above them. Heaven must be something like that, a vantage point from where we can see all our bipolar emotions and the world’s vicissitudes for the insignificant blots that they truly are. All those joys and sorrows of our life might balance each other out, but the glory that is heaven far outshines them both and is their ultimate end and purpose.
It is so very important not to miss this important lesson of the Rosary, and in particular of the Ascension of our Lord into heaven. We must never lose sight of this, our final goal. The promise of heaven will see us through all life’s disappointments and trials, and will be the fulfillment of our earthly joys that are just a pale foretaste of what is to come.
Encouraged by this vision, we should begin now our path upwards. We must strive each day to rise above the insignificant things that hold us down. The first thing we must do is to identify what those things are. Like the demons that Christ cast out into the herd of swine, they are legion, too many to enumerate. And they’re different for each one of us. So all I can do is give you a few pointers of what kind of thing to look out for.
We can start with our bad habits, our vices. Things we do that take us away from God. They may be sinful habits, or perhaps just imperfections that distract us from being the saints we should be. Today’s resolution should be to examine our conscience on this, identify our own personal vices, and then figure out a way to combat them by practicing the opposing virtues, patience instead of irritability, moderation instead of gluttony, and so on.
Next we should turn our attention to the often overlooked examination of our own personality. Our day-to-day mood swings, our emotional instabilities, our hopes and despairs, our fears and self-pity, anger and resentment, our tendencies to compare ourselves with others, our desire to outshine others and be better than them. We all have a personality, and no one is perfect. So let’s look for the imperfections in our own nature and again, try to come up with a way to iron them out and seek greater emotional stability in a life of virtue. What do we need to let go of? What weighs us down and prevents us from rising with our Lord to the things of God? The heavy burden that is our personality needs to be set aside from time to time—we cannot carry everything with us through life or we will become overwhelmed and spiritually useless.
Ultimately, we need to reduce our load to one thing and one thing only—the Cross. It is the only thing that our Lord has asked us to pick up and carry. And once we have embraced whatever cross God places upon our shoulders, we will find that our yoke is easy and our burden light. The Cross is not something we would normally look for as the one thing we’d want to pick up and carry everywhere, and yet it is the answer to everything. As the world turns, the Cross stands, a symbol of utter peace and stability in spite of its heaviness. And if we carry our Cross with humility and perseverance, nothing will prevent us from following our blessed Lord, not just up the road to Calvary, but up and beyond, into the eternal spheres of celestial bliss.