There are many reasons to regret the transfer of the Solemnity of the Ascension to the seventh Sunday of the Easter season. Among other things, the transfer shortens the Church’s time to reflect on this great feast, whose meaning has become ever more important in this cultural moment.
What does the Ascension of the Lord mean?
The Ascension means that humanity—the human nature assumed by the second Person of the Trinity at the Incarnation—has been incorporated into the life of God himself.
The Incarnation, celebrated on the Solemnity of the Annunciation, teaches us that our humanity is a worthy vessel for God’s action in history. The Ascension teaches us that human nature—glorified in what Pope Benedict XVI called the “evolutionary leap” of the Resurrection—is now fitted into the eternal communion of self-giving love and receptivity that is the triune God. And if, as the Collect for the Ascension notes, the Ascension of Christ is also “our exaltation,” that is because “where the Head has gone before in glory, the Body is called to follow in hope.” Moreover, that hope is not a vain fantasy, because the Lord promised, before his Passion, that those who ally themselves with his person and his cause will follow him into the Father’s house (see John 13:36, 14:2).
Appreciating the significance of the Ascension means clearing our mind on what it means that Christ was “carried up into Heaven” (Luke 24:51). Skeptics question, even mock, the Ascension because they think of it in spatial terms: as if Jesus in his Ascension anticipated Tom Cruise’s hypersonic flight at the beginning of Top Gun: Maverick, where Chief Warrant Officer “Hondo” Coleman marvels, “He’s the fastest man alive.” No, the Ascension can only be understood as a transhistorical reality: an event in history that transcends history by opening a window into humanity’s true destiny, which is life beyond history in that eternity Jesus called the Kingdom of God.
The Ascension completes the sequence of appearances in which the Risen Lord “presented himself alive [to the apostles] after his Passion … appearing to them over forty days and speaking of the Kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). And in this last appearance, he, the Lord of history and the cosmos, points beyond this world to the glorious future of a Creation brought to fulfillment in the “new Jerusalem” where “death shall be no more … for the former things have passed away” (Rev 21:2, 4).
The Ascension is thus crucial in the Church’s response to the crisis of our time, which is the crisis in the very idea of the human person.
That crisis comes into sharpest focus when we consider the loathsome practice that goes by the Orwellian moniker “natural organic reduction,” in which thermophile microbes reduce the mortal remains of men and women to compost, which can then be used like the compost you buy at Home Depot. Green proponents of this barbarism claim that human composting has ecological value because it turns dead bodies into nutrients of the soil—which is probably not how the gardeners among relatives of the 73,000 British Empire soldiers killed during World War I’s Battles of the Somme imagined the fate of their loved ones whose remains were never found. Extremist greens thus demonstrate once again that they worship a false god, Gaia.
Human composting is legal in thirteen states (Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, California, New York, Nevada, Arizona, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota, Maine, and Georgia). In every instance, the local Church has opposed the legalization of turning the bodies of the dead into fertilizer. Predictably, however, some in the Permission-Slip Subdivision of the Catholic bioethics guild have defended the practice, whose grisly precursors include some of the most grotesque practices of Nazi Germany’s extermination camps, where human remains were turned into bars of soap.
Human composting does not, as some of its Catholic proponents suggest, reflect the biblical teaching that we are dust and to dust we shall return (see Genesis 3:19). On the contrary: it reflects the warped, degraded anthropology that regards humanity as the accidental result of cosmic biochemical forces that, over billions of years, just happened to produce us. The Ascension, and indeed the entire arc of biblical anthropology from Genesis to Revelation, teaches a diametrically different view of our humanity: we are not congealed stardust, but rather creatures of a loving Creator whose destiny, made manifest in Christ risen and ascended, is neither oblivion nor fertilizer, but glory.
Which is the more humane view, from which we learn to respect others? Which is the view that can underwrite personal happiness and social solidarity?
It’s not the view that we’re compost-in-waiting.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Ecclesiastes 12:7-9
New Catholic Edition
7 and the dust returns to the earth as it once was: and the life-breath returns to God who gave it.
“Green” burial, if available, does not use the harsh chemicals and returns the remains to the earth. The body is wrapped in natural fibers and buried (there is a quick time frame though)
I read the article you referenced in “defending the practice, “While not everyone shares the same beliefs with regard to the reverent and respectful treatment of human remains, we believe there are a great many New Yorkers who would be uncomfortable at best with this proposed composting/fertilizing method, which is more appropriate for vegetable trimmings and eggshells than for human bodies.”(New York bishops’ statement)
This statement is meant to oppose the practice, but seems very weak to me.
Given what you say about the resurrection, and the fact that Jesus is both human and Devine, and that He even ate in the presence of the apostles, is it still inappropriate to ask the question – Where is Jesus? (in terms of an actual place)
The essential point that Catholicism MUST make (and I fear it does not by omission, so as not to be offensive to its new-found ecological buds) is that man is a qualitatively different part of creation. He is NOT just another part of the created world. Unlike the things God “just” makes, the creation of man is framed as deliberative. Unlike other things, the person who is man is made in the Divine image and likeness. Unlike whatever “God said … and it was” and called “good,” only the creation of man is pronounced “very good” and leads to God’s rest (but not his abandonment of creation) because He now has a responsible co-creator to carry on His work. That distinctiveness of man is lost on generations nourished on too much Disney “circle of life” stuff — and the Church fails in its EVANGELICAL mission by not proclaiming this truth clearly and insisting upon it with the “ecological dialogue about our common home.” One can sin by commission. One can also sin by omission.
The Caribbean is named after the Kalinago indigenous peoples who were thought to be cannibals. (Caribales in Spanish) The Spanish Christians were revulsed by the practice of barbecuing humans for food. Half a millennium later, shamefully you George is given the unenviable task, of defending the composting of human beings, against modern day barbaric hordes. He who created them after His Own Image will be eternally grateful.
I probably will be sorry for asking, but how does this work? Usually you have to bury the deceased within a cement liner to prevent groundwater contamination. Where I live people get buried above ground because of the higher water table.
I guess they must have it figured out but on the surface it sounds like bad sanitation. The UK town of Haworth where the Brontes lived suffered from that issue because the cemetery was located close to the water supply.
MrsCracker:
Greetings!
There are all sorts of YouTube videos on burial practices, so if you really want to know (and you might not…)
God bless,
MrsHess
Regular burial practices are also grotesque.
Perhaps if we had the option to be anointed with perfume and herbs, wrapped in a linen, and placed in a grave without all the concrete, fancy (and exorbitantly priced) coffins, in a proper Catholic cemetery, folks might not choose all grotesque option.
But…Church funerals and burials are very expensive, and the above idea certainly is not endorsed by the Church.
Oops, I hit the wrong key & I think my reply vanished into cyberspace. Oh well.
The shorthand version was that you can forgo embalming in some states, purchase plain wooden coffins if you ask for the orthodox Jewish models, & cement liners prevent the grave from collapsing after the coffin rots.
I’ve had very good experiences with funeral homes & gravestone providers but I was upfront about what I wanted & what I didn’t. And they respected that. I know there can be some sketchy people in the business but I didn’t run into those.
About Benedict’s use of the term “evolutionary leap” for the Resurrection, at an earlier date Pope St. John Paul II used a more precise (and later ambiguously translated?) term for the appearance of Man: the “ontological leap”…
The term “ontological leap” appears in John Paul II, “Message on Evolution to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences,” (October 23, 1996) where he explicitly affirms that “the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis” (n. 4). But, then, also affirms the ontological leap as more than evolutionary:
“The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation [meaning natural science and evolution], which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being. But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-awareness and self-reflection, of moral conscience, freedom, or again of aesthetic and religious experience, fall within the competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while theology brings out its ultimate meaning according to the Creator’s plans.”