Ascension Day

In my family, a keen enjoyment of the Mary Poppins books and films provides a link across five generations. I have been enjoying watching the film with my son, having read the books and watched the film with my mother when I was a child. My mother received the books by P.L. Travers as a gift from her grandparents.

At the end of the film, Mary Poppins ascends into the clouds using her magical umbrella as kites fly in the sky. Her mission is complete: she has facilitated healed relationships and realigned priorities for a troubled family and rendered herself superfluous to their ongoing requirements. Her work is done. It is a touching moment, as her talking umbrella handle remarks that the children “didn’t even say goodbye”.

The iconic image of Mary Poppins floating up into the clouds often crosses my mind on Ascension Day. I think of the drama and complex emotions related to Jesus leaving his disciples and going physically elsewhere, going away. After the emotional rollercoaster of Jesus’s death and resurrection, His Ascension can seem like an afterthought, particularly given the fact that we remember the event on a Thursday in the middle of a working week.

Renaissance and Baroque art often depicts Christ physically ascending into the clouds, just like Mary Poppins. Of course, our understanding of the relationship between earth and heaven is more complicated than that, and we tend to think of it as metaphysical rather than geographical. But the important point remains that God the Son, Jesus Christ, went away and went elsewhere, to sit at God the Father’s right hand in glory, and that He sent the Holy Spirit to be our advocate. There is an elsewhere, another place. This is a fundamental aspect of Christian theology, and one that we recite whenever we say the words of the creed.