Absence

We are approaching the shortest season of the Christian year. It lasts a little over a week and is known as Ascensiontide.

Ascensiontide is a season for celebrating absence, a season of paradox.

Edward Hopper 'Automat' (1927)

Absence correlates with loneliness. A great deal is being said these days about loneliness and whether or not the problem of loneliness in our society is either helped or exacerbated by the internet. Are we living in an increasingly ‘virtual’ world, one which is, by implication, false? If so, loneliness, in its various manifestations, especially those related to addiction and abuse, must also be connected to loss and bereavement, the loss of what is real and true in human relationships.

It is at first surprising that the Christian Church should treat this interim season, between the Ascension of Christ into heaven and the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, as one of joyful expectancy. For the disciples, it was also a time of disorientation and emotional disorder. Ascensiontide is a time of conflicting emotions. A certain tension prevails which needs to be broken, so that negative and sad emotions can be dis-ordered and then reconfigured in ways which change how we see things, and perhaps how we see God. Ascensiontide is, like Advent and Lent, a time of preparation in which we know God in his absence, prior to knowing him in a new way.

We get so used to a negative experience of absence in our lives, absence associated with separation or bereavement, and to what it does to us, that at times it is hard to imagine how life would be if that absence were to be filled. Absence speaks of a space that has been vacated, either because someone, or some animal we love, has left us or died, or because we ourselves have left another person or a place we associate with happiness, so absence also resonates with loss.

How does such a seemingly bleak situation connect with the season of Ascensiontide? I think the answer comes in the form of joyful expectation, or ‘hope-filled waiting’. Hope involves risk. It means being prepared to have our sadness questioned and then thrown into disorder while we remain realistic about what caused it in the first place. Hope comes with being realistic about how human beings connect or engage with one another, and about life itself and our own mortality. The disciples waiting in the upper room were acutely aware of their connectedness with one another in the one whose presence they so missed. They also feared for their physical lives.

A sense of connectedness is essential to our physical and emotional survival, especially in times of separation or danger, but connectedness does not have to be limited to our immediate family or social ‘circles’, to employ the language of social media. We are also connected to all those who, in these times of religious extremism and global turmoil, fear for their lives. This is the wider context in which our own particular sadness, and whatever emotional violence we may be experiencing, is held and healed.

Connectedness also has to do with having a sense of history, our own, that of our society and of the planet which we share. When connectedness is understood in this way it sustains us because it allows us to understand life as an unlimited, or eternal, creative event. There are scientists who are even beginning to think of the universe, or universes, as an eternity of eternities. Presumably it is ‘uncreated’ life itself which connects these eternities.

Such a way of thinking might also help us to make sense of conflicting emotions. The moving unbounded event of life anchors the chaos of our negative or destructive emotions. It reconnects them with the interdependence of all living things, and reconnects the present moment with both the past and the future. The way our individual lives have touched upon those of other people, including those whom we have perhaps never met, is part of this continuum. Where our connectedness with others is interrupted we experience a profound sense of absence, or loss, a kind of relational vacuum. Perhaps the internet makes us feel this loss all the more keenly.

But it is in this acute sense of loss or absence, this vacant space, that we wait with joyful expectation for the renewing event of Pentecost, for a sudden surprising ‘wind of change’ which derives from a single source, a single energy. It derives from the energy of God’s love, of truth itself, at work in the present moment in which a particular absence is perhaps being most acutely felt.