One year ago, on the feast of the Ascension, we attended Mass in a hotel basement.
One of our older kids was in a weekend tournament, and a priest from one of the Catholic school teams offered to say Mass for anyone who wanted to attend. So we trooped downstairs to a large conference room, where we sat in uncomfortable chairs under drab fluorescent lighting — and one of the loveliest moments of my motherhood unfolded.
My youngest child was tired and cranky, whining and wrestling in my lap until he fell asleep on my shoulder, snoring straight through the Gospel. Strangers around us smiled, laughing as they listened to him sleeping loudly.
Before us stood a Cistercian priest, preaching on the Ascension. “When love seems absent,” he said, reading a homily that he had written 15 years earlier after the death of his mother, “love is actually closer than we know.”
Cistercians are known for silence, contemplative prayer and manual labor. Mothers, too (well, at least the last one is guaranteed.) But what the priest preached that day spoke straight to my heart as a parent.
The feast of the Ascension bears witness to the lasting truth of love every Easter season. In the Resurrection and Ascension, love moves, changes, transforms and even becomes unrecognizable from how it began — just like Jesus in his newly resurrected body. But love never leaves.
This is what I want my children to know: If they ever fear that love has gone forever, love has not left. Even in death, life is changed, but not ended.
Love never leaves.
That Sunday, my son snored through the whole Eucharistic Prayer. My arms ached, but I wouldn’t put him down. Fifteen years earlier, a nurse, a doctor and a doula had worked together to place a warm, wailing newborn into my weary arms for the first time, and I wept with joy. Now I knew too well how quickly those carrying years pass.
So I carried my son up to Communion, back to the uncomfortable chair, up the steep stairs, outside the hotel and down the street to dinner after Mass. His baby-soft cheek was still smushed against mine, his gangly limbs dangling heavy at my sides. He had not fallen asleep that way for months or even years: in my arms, from my rocking, with my warmth, body to body.
Mothering is a presence that pulses in flesh and blood. A love that can never go absent, even when it looks like it has left.
When Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene on Easter morning, he greeted her by name and then told her, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father” (Jn 20:17). Until I understood the mystery of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, this line had puzzled me. Why wouldn’t Jesus want his dear friend to embrace him? How would his ascending to the Father make it possible for Mary to hold on to him later?
But once you hold the host in your hands, and realize that the gift of the Eucharistic presence came from what looked like absence — Jesus’ ascension into heaven, and the gift of himself that he left behind — then you realize the paradox of every powerful love.
When love looks like it has left, it is never truly gone.
When God feels most absent, God may be most present.
At the street corner, my son finally woke in my arms — just as he had awakened a thousand times before, blinking and returning to the world after rest.
“What happened to Mass?” He asked, confused. “Where did Communion go?”
“Here,” I pressed a kiss against his sweaty forehead. “Right here.”
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