Lord Jesus ascended into heaven. He won His race. He fought His fight. He completed His pilgrimage. [Spanish]
He made human life make sense. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character calls mankind a “quintessence of dust.” Fitzgerald concluded his tragic Great Gatsby: “We beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
The insoluble problem of human existence. Human mortality. Human dissatisfaction with our lot. The problem has no solution. Except Jesus Christ.
Maybe you have heard that a new kind of atheism has hit the streets. The first school of 21st-century atheism directly confronted our Christian faith in God. Tried to prove it irrational. This older 21st-century atheism insisted that science can account for everything, that the Bible is incoherent, and that we don’t ‘need’ God anymore, since we human beings have figured everything out. Or we can use Google to figure it out, if we haven’t already.
That’s the old 21st-century atheism. The new-and-improved kind actually revives the atheism of Karl Marx. According to this new school of atheism, religion isn’t bad because it’s wrong. Whether religion is right or wrong doesn’t matter. Religion is bad because it’s distracting.
The new atheism turns hope for heaven on its head. Reality as we know it now is better than eternity with God. We experience love and joy and communion with beauty now precisely because it’s all temporary. If it were eternal, it wouldn’t be what we love, and rejoice in, now.
This seems to me like “Wallace Stevens Atheism.” He wrote poems which expressed this sense: what we have now, temporarily, is everything. A sunset ravishes us with its beauty because, in ten minutes, it will end. This new 21st-century atheism comes at the denial of God poetically, rather than scientifically.
Now, the Second Vatican Council taught us: We must try to understand atheists. Trying to understand them purifies our faith and helps us focus on God as He actually is, rather than as we feebly imagine Him to be.
Lord Jesus completed His human pilgrimage by ascending–in His human body and soul–to God, to the heavenly Father.
We do not say that temporal life here on earth means nothing. We do not say that the invisible God is all, and everything visible sucks. No. Christ came from the bosom of the Father. The universe springs from His eternal Wisdom. By becoming man, the eternal Word of God drew His creation into the mystery of His triune love. God lived a human life, like ours, to redeem our human lives from oblivion.
The new, poetic atheism has no interest in the origin of things. Things like a blue heron on the wing, arcing along a creek in the breeze. Or the smell of curry cooking in a panang sauce. Or the pitter-patter of a gentle rain while you’re sitting on the porch.
But failing to acknowledge the eternal origin of such rhapsodies–that robs them of their genuine beauty. Visible created things shine forth the beauty of their as-yet-unseen Creator. A gazelle loping across the savanna isn’t beautiful because its run is temporary. It’s beautiful because, in its temporariness, it communicates a message from eternity. Such lovelinesses serve as a short-term love-notes to us from Beauty Everlasting, Who loves us long-term.
Lord Jesus made it possible for us to receive love from our heavenly Father during this temporary pilgrimage. Then He ascended into heaven. God forbid that we would betray our teacher and leader by claiming to know now what heaven will be like. We don’t. Nor do we presume that we will get there. We could fall. Only by the mysterious grace of God do we progress toward the goal.
But, by the same token, we hope with every fiber and long with every corner of our hearts to reach the celestial mansions where Jesus now reigns. Our Christian joy during our pilgrimage relies on our knowing that we make a pilgrim way now. We strive forward through passing time. Towards something permanent. That’s what we mean by “pilgrimage.”
That goal, mysterious as it is–beyond us as it is; impossible even to imagine—that goal certainly involves the fulfillment of all the gifts that the Father gives us now. Their fulfillment; not their betrayal or nullification. When God is all in all, heaven won’t destroy the earth. Heaven and earth will be one.
So we strive day by day. In heaven–please God we get there–we will rest. Now beauty and happiness come in fleeting foretastes—foretastes of the unseen God. In heaven–please God we get there–all beauty and all happiness will be now and only now. And now will not pass away.
Father Mark White Blog 
It’s said that the Christian faith in Europe is in decline. The sanctuaries are visited more by tourists to a museum than by worshippers to their God. Maybe so. Maybe we’re slouching toward Europe, too…the result of abundant wealth and leisure, the pursuit of amusement over holiness. We look around at all we have and believe that we created it and saw that it was good. We worship the created things instead of their Creator. Sometimes He throws up His hands and abandons us to our sins….as if to say, “ok, have it your way.” We never seem to stray too far from the apple in the Garden. The pain and suffering that follows is what jerks us back to God. Eventually. Thank God for His patience and mercy.
Beautiful!