Below are three of Fr. Abbot's homilies: for the Feast of the Ascension of our Lord, and for the Feast of Pentecost, 2008.

At the end of Lent, we sing in the Liturgy: "now that we have completed the 40 days that bring profit to our souls…" This is sung just before the beginning of Holy Week, the immediate and most intense preparation for the celebration of the Resurrection of Christ. Today perhaps we could also sing: "now that we have completed the 40 days that bring profit to our souls…" but this is a different 40 days and a different sort of profit to our souls. We are about to begin a more intense preparation for the feast of Pentecost, which is the crown of the paschal season.

At the completion of the 40 days of Easter, commemorating the time that the Risen Lord was bodily present to his disciples, we celebrate the Ascension of the Lord into Heaven, which historically marks the end of his post-resurrection appearances to them. But this feast is much more important than the acknowledgement of a particular historical event.

The Gospel and the account from the Acts of the Apostles tell us what happened: Jesus was carried up to Heaven on a cloud in the sight of his disciples. But these accounts don't really tell us what it means that He ascended to Heaven. For that we have to look elsewhere in the Bible.

The Ascension is perhaps a difficult mystery for modern people to accept. It may seem a little too much like a fairy-tale ending to the story of the life of Jesus—floating up to Heaven on a cloud and all that. But, for one thing, after we have read the Gospel accounts full of astonishing miracles and even Jesus' resurrection from the dead, his ascension shouldn't seem any more incredible than all the rest. But that's not really the point. Jesus didn't need to return to Heaven the way He did, but the visual element helped the disciples to understand the mystery.

Jesus didn't have to be carried into the sky on a cloud until He was lost from the disciples' sight, because Heaven isn't up in the sky or in the far reaches of the universe. Jesus could have simply vanished from their midst, as He did in the house at Emmaus. But what would they have understood from that? The dramatic departure indicated that Jesus hadn't simply disappeared from their midst, but that He had indeed be taken up into Heaven, which confirmed for them his words that He had in fact come from Heaven in the first place.

It is quite natural—and religious anthropology supports this—to think of Heaven as being "up there." Even if we know that it is more like another dimension of reality than a place whose coordinates we can plot, it doesn't make sense to symbolically locate it anywhere else but "up." In Hebrew and Greek there are not separate words for "sky" and "heaven." All that is above us constitutes "the heavens." We only began giving the name "Heaven" to the place God dwells because it had already been believed for millennia that God did indeed dwell somewhere "up there."

Jesus Himself used the same language: "No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man, who is in heaven" (John 3:13). So, in order to get to Heaven from Earth, one must ascend; in order to get to Earth from Heaven, one must descend. Yet Jesus also transcended this merely spatial concept when He added that the Son of Man, who was at that moment speaking on Earth, "is in Heaven."

In order to ascend to Heaven, Jesus did not need visibly to rise on a cloud, but it helped the disciples understand what was really happening. Jesus was returning to the Father, to the glory which the Father had given Him before the world began, a glory in which, as the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, He never left. But now, as man, this glory is experienced in a new way. Now it is not only his proper and eternal divine glory that belongs to Him as the Son of God, but it is a glory that his obedience as man to the Father's will had won for Him: a glorified humanity now inseparably united to the glory of his divinity. St Paul says that because Jesus was obedient to death on the Cross, the Father highly exalted Him, so that every knee would bow at the name of Jesus, and every tongue confess Him as Lord.

Jesus succinctly describes the mystery of his incarnation and his ascension in one verse of the Gospel of John: "I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father" (16:28). To come into the world from the Father is to "descend from Heaven"; to leave the world and go to the Father is to "ascend to Heaven."

But what are we to make of all this? For one thing, the angel's words to the Apostles give us a little more understanding about why Jesus chose to ascend visibly from the Earth, on a cloud: "this Jesus who was taken up from you into Heaven will come back in the same way…" That means that the Second Coming of Christ will not be some invisible spiritual event, perceptible only to the eyes of faith. The Book of Revelation tells us: "Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him…" (1:7). Jesus Himself said, when standing trial before the Sanhedrin: "You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven" (Mt. 26:64). So, in the ascension account, the cloud is not just a poetic stage prop; it connects the ascension of Christ with his Second Coming in glory.

But even though we may understand this through a careful reading of Scripture, we may still wish to know how this mystery affects our lives in the here and now. We may rightly praise and worship the Lord, who received glory from the Father upon the completion of his earthly mission, and we may also believe and profess that He is coming to judge the living and the dead at the end of the world. But there sure is a lot of time between the Ascension and the Second Coming, and we may wish to know what we're supposed to do in the meantime.

We do have, of course, plenty of counsels in the Gospels and Epistles about how to live between the time of Ascension and Parousia. But there has to be some sort of principle on which we can base all our actions and that enables us to do God's will. Ultimately, of course, it is the grace of the Holy Spirit that enables us to do anything good at all, and that is why the Lord told the disciples that after He leaves, He would send the Holy Spirit. But there's something about the mystery of Ascension itself that we need to incorporate into our lives if we wish to receive the Lord in joy when He comes again—for that passage from Revelation said there would be lamentation when he returned on the clouds, and we don't want to be among those lamenting his coming.

In our spiritual lives, the principle of ascension is the flip side, so to speak, of the doctrine of the Cross. Jesus told us that in order to follow him we must deny ourselves. The mystery of Ascension perhaps puts it more positively and says we have to transcend ourselves, come out of ourselves, in order to renounce our own will and do the Lord's. We die that we may rise; we deny that we may ascend. The Son of Man, while still on Earth, said that He was in Heaven. In order to live the life Jesus calls us to live, we too have to be in Heaven, not bodily, but we have to come out of our own little world of our thoughts and feelings and problems and unite ourselves to Christ, and try to share his life and his love, his vision of what is true and good and beautiful. St Paul exhorts us: "If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above… your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory" (Col. 3:1-4). St Paul brings all these elements together, just like today's readings: resurrection, ascension, and Christ's coming in glory.

So we have to make daily ascensions, rising above our pettiness, selfishness, and anything else in us that does not reflect the love and beauty of Jesus. To deny ourselves for Jesus' sake and that of the Gospel is not merely a negative thing, but is the necessary condition for rising above ourselves, above all the things that spiritually weigh us down and keep us from seeking the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father.

We begin our ascension on the sacramental level through repentance and confession, and we are carried with Christ into the mystery of the Holy Trinity through Holy Communion. Alexander Schmemann says that the Divine Liturgy is a movement of ascension, Jesus taking us up mystically to where He is, that we may eat and drink with Him at his table in his Kingdom. And this is the will of Christ, for he prayed to his Father before he left this world: "Father, I desire that those whom you have given me may be with me where I am, to behold my glory…" (Jn. 17:24).

So let us rejoice that the Lord has gone to prepare a place for us, that He wants us to be where He is, and that He gives us a foretaste now through the Holy Eucharist. And let us be willing to make our daily ascensions, transcending ourselves to be with the Lord and to live on the level of grace, and not merely that of emotion or of personal preference. Thus when He returns on the clouds, says the Apostle, we too will appear with Him in glory.

Jesus loves the Holy Spirit. That's something that we don't often hear about and probably don't think about much, either. But on this Feast of Pentecost perhaps we ought to reflect on that for a moment. We often hear that Jesus loves us, and He Himself says in the Gospels that He loves the Father. And we can assume that each Person of the Holy Trinity loves the Others with an infinite and indescribable love. But does the Gospel say anything about Jesus' relationship to the Holy Spirit? It does say several things, and I'll briefly mention two of them here.

From what we can learn from the Gospels, especially John, Jesus' love for the Holy Spirit is intimately related to his love for us. Jesus loves us so much that He will give us nothing less than his own divine Spirit of love, and this was so important to Him that He was willing to leave his own disciples just so the Spirit would be able to come. Jesus said: "I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you… When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you to all the truth… for He will take what is mine and declare it to you" (Jn. 16:7, 13-15).

Jesus loves the Holy Spirit so much that He will step out of the way to let the Spirit come into the world and into the hearts and souls of his disciples. Yet it is not the case that the Holy Spirit merely takes over where Jesus leaves off—the Holy Spirit is the personal means by which Jesus Himself is always with his disciples and the whole Church, until the end of the world. After Jesus ascended to the Father, He is present to us now solely through the grace of the Holy Spirit. Even his abiding presence in the Holy Eucharist is accomplished by the grace of the Holy Spirit. During the Divine Liturgy, we implore, we pray, and we entreat the Father to make the bread and wine before us the Body and Blood of Christ: "changing them by your Holy Spirit."

In the Gospel for this feast (Jn 7:37-52; 8:12), Jesus calls attention to Himself only so that He can give us the Holy Spirit. When He wants to show his love for the Holy Spirit, Jesus invites Him to sanctify the faithful. When He wants to show his love for us, Jesus invites us to receive the Holy Spirit. "Come to Me and drink," cried Jesus on the last, great day of the feast—and today is the 50^th day, which is what "Pentecost" means, the last and great day of the holy 50 days of this festive season (even though an octave of post-festive celebration still remains!) Why does Jesus ask us to drink, and what is the river of living water to which He refers? First of all, Jesus knows that we all have a deep and innate thirst for God, and He asks us to recognize that. The psalms indicate this in several places: "My soul thirsts for God, the living God" (41/42); "my soul thirsts for You… like a dry, weary land without water" (62/63); "like a parched land my soul thirsts for You" (142/143).

Thirst is used as a metaphor for our longing for God because it is the most powerful and urgent of human needs. We can deny most other desires almost indefinitely, and we can even go without food for weeks without perishing. But we can last only a very short time without water. Indeed, Jesus Himself suffered painfully from thirst on the Cross, and as Mother Teresa would often remind us, this thirst was for more than water—it was for the souls whom He longed to save, the souls for whom He was in agony on the Cross.

So Jesus says: "If anyone thirst…" He knows that in fact everyone thirsts, but He first invites those who are aware of their thirst, who cry out to God as did the psalmist, who know that they cannot live without Him. Jesus spoke of the living waters that would flow from within Him, and the evangelist tells us: "Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in Him were to receive." So it is the grace of the Holy Spirit that satisfies our thirst for the living God. Both Jesus and St John say that this gift of the Holy Spirit is meant for those who believe in Jesus.

Jesus is trying to focus our thirst for God on the One whom God had sent into the world to redeem it. That's why He says: "If anyone thirst, let him come to me, and let him who believes in me drink." If we thirst for God, we must come to Jesus and drink the living water that flows from Him like a river: the grace of the Holy Spirit.

But what is the purpose of this? We come to Jesus and drink of the grace of the Holy Spirit. What then? Well, we then have to bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit. In case you have forgotten what the fruit of the Spirit is, St Paul will remind you: "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control" (Gal. 5:22-23). This is the infallible test to see if we are living in the Holy Spirit. If you see an apple tree full of healthy ripe apples, then you know it is bearing the fruit that God intended it to bear when He created it. If it doesn't actually bear apples, it doesn't matter if it is still an apple tree; it is useless and will soon be cut down. Likewise, if we are manifestly full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, self-control and all the rest, it will be clear that we are bearing the fruit God intended when He created us and when He gave us the gift of his Spirit. But let us not deceive ourselves: if we are not manifesting love and joy and kindness and the other fruits, then we are simply not living in the Holy Spirit, for wherever the Spirit is, there the fruit of the Spirit is manifest. There are many images in Scripture about the fruitless trees or vines: the ax is laid to the root, the fruitless branches are cut off and burned, the fruitless fig tree is cursed and withered or simply cut down.

But we might say: surely I am in the grace of the Spirit, since I pray and receive God's grace through the sacraments. Certainly grace is given in this way; that is God's gift of love. But whether we bear fruit depends largely on us. St Paul warns us against receiving the grace of God in vain (2Cor. 6:1). And Jesus said that his good seed could fall upon hard or thorny ground and bear no fruit. Jesus also said this to St Faustina: "Souls full of pride… lukewarm souls… My Heart cannot bear this. All the graces I pour out on them flow off them as off the face of a rock."

What then shall we do? First of all, we must awaken and deepen our thirst for God. We must desire his grace with all our hearts. Implicit in any genuine desire for God will be the willingness to do or to suffer whatever it takes to please the Lord, to bear the fruit He wishes to reap from our lives. This will go against the grain of our selfish and habitual ways of doing things. We will have to plow up the inner ground, throw out the rocks, pull up the weeds, and let the word of God be planted in us and watered by that living water which is the grace of the Holy Spirit.

We will also need (to change the metaphor) fresh wineskins to receive the New Wine. I recently read this from the Gospel of Mark as part of my daily Scripture reading. The old wineskins—our old, dried up, shrunken and brittle hearts—are unable to bear the powerful, sweet, and vivifying New Wine of the Spirit. So we need new hearts if we are fruitfully to receive the grace of the Holy Spirit. We heard that in the reading from Ezekiel at Vespers of Pentecost. First God says he will give us a new heart, and then He will give us a new spirit. First He will remove our heart of stone and replace it with a living heart of flesh, and then He will put his own Spirit within us (Ez. 36:26-27). We need the new wineskin before the new wine is poured in. We need the new heart before God's Spirit can dwell within and bear fruit.

So let's make this our prayer for this Feast of Pentecost: that the Lord will remove our hearts of stone and grant us new hearts which will be worthy dwelling places for his Holy Spirit. Along with the new hearts let us pray that God will also increase in us the thirst for Him: for his word and wisdom, his grace and mercy, his love and joy, so that we will be able to bear the fruit of the Spirit in abundance, for his glory and for the good of the souls entrusted to our prayer and faithfulness.

The readings for this feast are full of images of the Spirit, and they are images of his divine dynamism and power: Wind, Fire, and Rivers of Water. Let us open ourselves fully to his grace. Let us not grieve the Holy Spirit, as the Apostle says, by speaking or acting in ways that do not manifest the fruit of the Spirit. May the Lord never have to say of us that all the graces He gives us flow off of us as off the face of a rock. Let us rather be like spiritual sponges that completely absorb the living water of his grace. And then, when the trials of life press upon us, living water will flow out from us to others, and our lives will be an acceptable sacrifice unto the Lord. For Jesus said not only that the Spirit would flow from Him but that the Spirit would also flow from those who believe in Him.

So let us give thanks to the Lord, who pours out the abundance of his love upon us, who does not parcel out the gift of his Spirit but bestows his grace lavishly. Thus may we bear a hundredfold spiritual fruit—with new hearts, new spirits, and with fresh wineskins overflowing with every spiritual blessing from Heaven.

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