We have heard the saying, and our experience confirms it:  “What goes up must come down.”  Sir Isaac Newton confirmed it through experimentation and equation, helping us to understand the force of gravity.  In the physical realm here on planet earth, what goes up invariably comes down.  So constant is this phenomenon that we say it must happen.

The same is not necessarily true in the spiritual realm.  God is not constrained by the laws of physics—He is their Creator.  When he draws something up and away, it is not necessarily coming down.  We think of Elijah in his chariot.  We think of Mary and her Assumption.  Heaven is our ultimate destination, and most of us, once we are up there, will have no desire to come down again.  What goes up stays up.

How remarkable it is, then, that the Lord’s Ascension is followed by the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  This past Thursday we celebrated God the Son’s ascent into heaven where he began and where he belongs.  But one week from now we will celebrate God the Spirit’s descent among us again.  Though our God could go up and stay up, he chooses to come down again.  The first time he came, it was in the flesh, in the second Person of the Blessed Trinity.  He came down to walk among and beside us as our Lord and brother in a particular time and place.  When God comes down again it is in the Spirit, in the third Person of the Blessed Trinity.  This time he will come to dwell within us, to intimately enter in and unite himself to each of us, in every time and place.  Though God doesn’t have to, he chooses to come down again, for our sake, out of love.

I remember the poet John Shea addressing God about this beautiful fact in a poem called The God Who Fell From Heaven many years ago:      

               But the story says
               You cried
               And so heavy was the tear
               You fell with it to earth
               Where like a baritone in a bar
               It is never time to go home.

He reminds us of a God who came among us in the flesh, and then, after apparently leaving, returned again in the Spirit to become incarnate in our flesh, in his Body the Church.  He never departs.  Even though in him it doesn’t have to, what goes up comes down again.

Sincerely,

Fr. Paul