(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: https://brothersinchristcmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Mass-Blog-for-the-Ascension-of-the-Lord-2025.mp3)
The Ascension seems like the perfect ending to the Easter season. This Sunday we read about Christ’s apostles looking up in the air after their Master gives them final instructions. But they still had worries, like:
“Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:1-11)
He answered, “It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority.”
In other words, “Don’t worry your little heads about that! I have important things for you to do.”
They were still anchored to their fears as their Master rose above them and disappeared. After all they’d been through with Jesus, one can imagine their wishing they could find an easy way to follow him and escape life’s continuing tortures—like the ones he endured and they were destined to.
But this occasion was not Easter’s ending. It was just the beginning of what Easter should mean to all souls: the eternal Passover from death to life. Our lives are meant to be Easter stories. Looking to the sky for an escape from the mysteries of our own life stories is a waste of precious time, as those angels conclude in Sunday’s first reading from Acts:
“Why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.”
In the meantime, looking for a quick and easy way toward a self-made heaven will only bring misery and frustration. We’ve been charged with finding and serving the risen Christ in each other’s lives. We enter his kingdom through those portals—not by waiting at death’s door. A death bed is not for the living.
But for some of us, certain death seems like the only answer to life’s uncertainties. Living is exhausting when spent on trial-and-error self- preservation.
One 90-year old man believed he found the answer.
He sent his friends and loved ones a farewell email, telling them he decided to go to Switzerland for a quick, painless suicide.
He wrote that he was basing his decision on a belief he’d held since he was a teenager—“that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief.”
He was starting to feel his 90 years, and he wanted to relieve himself and his friends of the burdens of his inevitable decline. One friend, reading the email sent just before this man ended his life, concluded: “The final words of his final email sound right, yet somehow feel wrong.”
That’s because this 90-year-old never graduated from his junior-high-school mind—although as a young man he went on to become a psychologist at Princeton University and even won the Nobel Prize in economics. Ironically, he spent his long academic career, in his words, “studying the imperfections and inconsistencies of human decision-making.”
Too bad he never studied under Dr. Viktor Frankl, professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna. Frankl’s 90-plus years were seasoned by the lessons of being a neurologist, a philosopher and a Holocaust survivor. In his masterpiece, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Frankl described what it means to ascend beyond human decision-making.
He cited the case of a mother whose 11-year-old son died. She was left alone to care for another son, who happened to be severely disabled. She almost followed the path blazed by others whose adolescent understanding of life’s meaning led them to an easy and painless way out of it—by murder AND suicide.
But unlike the adolescent-brained scholar of decision-making who chose death over seeking guidance from friends and family, this mother saved herself and her disabled son. Actually, her son saved her, convincing her that he enjoyed the life she gave him and that she should join him in that process.
Frankl also helped this mother rise above oblivion—by suggesting she imagine herself as an 80-year-old on her deathbed, looking back at the life she lived with the boy whose life she spared. What would be the lesson she learned from deciding to live, he wondered?
“That I made a fuller life possible for him,” she answered. “And as for myself, I can say my life was full of meaning.”
Viewing her life as if from a deathbed, she saw life’s purpose. It included experiencing all of her sufferings. Compare that to the case of the 90-year-old “adolescent” who made his own deathbed and died in it without the peace of such insight. He also deprived his family and friends of the chance to help him and gain the wisdom that helped Viktor Frankl suffer and survive through four Nazi death camps.
The Ascension is our opportunity to help each other pass over and beyond slavery to this world’s fears.
–Tom Andel
There is no easy way out and every life has a purpose given by the God who created us. He didn’t send us here for an easy existence. He sent us to know Him and honor Him by how we carry out the privilege of the life he created us for.
Clearly life can be difficult and for some more than others. But, when our challenges come as they surely will, it is then that we can prove to God that by trusting in Him we can love our way through our challenges.
First, we love God, then we love everyone he puts in our personal orbit. Through illness, old age, incapacitation, mental illness, all of these provide opportunities to give back what God gave each of us.
Come Lord Jesus!
The way we learn to live our lives helps us prove to ourselves what God already knows about us: that we are manifestations of God’s love–just as Jesus was. By dying for us and forgiving those who tortured and killed him, Jesus set the standard for how we are to live God’s love. When we find ways to love the least lovable, we get closer to returning God’s love to Him. That’s the meaning Victor Frankl was referring to in the title of his great book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He found life’s purpose by helping himself and others survive the aftermath of Nazi Germany. In such purpose, we find and return God’s love.