Brothers and sisters
Today, at #OLS, we mark a mystery that seems at once like a departure and a promise — the Ascension of our Lord.
Saint Luke tells us that Jesus, after opening the minds of His disciples to the Scriptures, blesses them, and is carried up into heaven. It is a simple scene, and yet it contains a depth beyond words. He lifts His hands in blessing — and in that gesture, He leaves us not with absence, but with presence of a different kind.
We live in a world that often believes that if one cannot touch something, it is not real. And yet we, monks of silence, know otherwise. We know that the invisible can be more real than the visible — that love, obedience, awe, longing — these are not things that can be held in the hand, but they hold us.
In ascending, Christ is not retreating. He is expanding His presence beyond the boundaries of Galilee and Jerusalem. His physical rising is not an escape from earth but a lifting of all creation toward heaven. And it is into that great lifting that we are drawn — not by striving or noise, but by surrender, by silence, by the slow fidelity of our hidden life.
We are told the disciples returned to Jerusalem with great joy. Joy — not sorrow. Because they understood, perhaps for the first time, that He had not left them behind. Rather, He had gone ahead. The veil between heaven and earth had thinned, and in their worship, their waiting, their silence, they had begun already to live in the space where heaven touches earth.
Brothers, we live in that space too.
Our silence is not an absence, but an attentiveness. Our stillness is not retreat, but a leaning toward His voice. In our chant, in our prayer, in the tending of garden and guest, we bear witness to the truth of the Ascension: that Christ is enthroned not far away, but near, lifting every part of our life into the presence of the Father.
Let us live today in that joy. And may our silence speak the glory of the risen and ascended Christ, who blesses us still.
Amen.