Dear friends in Jesus Christ,
Today, our Mother Church celebrates the Ascension of the Lord. This is one of the great solemnities of the Church because it is one of the significant events in the resurrected life of our Lord Jesus. The first reading is very clear about what happened! Jesus appeared alive to His disciples after He had died on the cross and had been buried. In these appearances, He spoke intimately with His followers about the kingdom of God and its demands on them. And Jesus tells His followers finally to wait in Jerusalem for the Holy 
Spirit that would be sent to them. The Gospel is even clearer about the demands on the followers of Jesus: they must preach the Gospel to others and certain signs will accompany those who believe: in the name of Jesus, they will drive out demons; they will speak new languages; they will pick up serpents with their hands; if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover. The real point of such a list is that with faith in Christ we can do what is impossible to a person without faith.
The focus of the Church after the Ascension is on the presence of Christ in those who believe. As a matter of fact, we still have the stunning presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist! However, we who believe now become His mouth for preaching, His hands for healing, His eyes for seeing and His feet for walking. The Ascension is about the building up of the body of Christ, about attaining the unity of faith and knowledge in Jesus, about maturing in Christ and about becoming completely alive in Jesus Christ. It is not simply a story of the past and yet it points us clearly to the coming of the Spirit so that we, the Church, can become what we are supposed to be in Christ: His divine presence for all those who do not yet believe and His pardoning presence for those of us who do believe and yet fail. We shall pray for a deepening of unity within the Church; for reconciliation among the many Christian Churches; and especially for the courage to live our faith in the power of the Holy Spirit and in the joy of being saved in Christ.