Inspired by Jacob’s dream of a ladder to heaven (Genesis 28:12), Scully’s stack of colored felt slabs rises more than ten meters toward the luminous dome of San Giorgio Maggiore, Palladio’s splendid Renaissance church in Venice. Amid the subdued grays and whites of the interior, the miraculous colors exude the vitality of spiritual aspiration, like spring flowers refuting winter’s drab.
On this Ascension Day, let me offer another image, a 36-second “video icon” of a cloud disappearing into the blue. Consider it a brief meditation on Luke’s text, “As they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9).
The Ascension of Christ takes us into an ineffable realm, far above the literalism of earthly life. What are we to make of such a strange story? The following video of an Ascension Day homily was streamed during the pandemic a few years ago, when we were not able to gather in person to celebrate the mystery. Fittingly, it was recorded mostly outside, under the open sky.
The religious imagineer 
Jim+ , above you write, “The Ascension of Christ takes us into an ineffable realm, far above the literalism of earthly life.”
What sense would you give to your use of the word ‘literalism’ in that sentence?
I suppose I was influenced by the traditional 4 levels of interpretation (literal, moral, allegorical, anagogical), 3 of which go beyond what the words
and stories say to find implicit or hidden meanings behind them. I didn’t mean to say that earthly life, which for me is rich with meanings within, behind and beyond what the senses tell us, is “only” literal, but rather that the exclusion of the ineffable is an incomplete account of reality.
Well, I love and commend the traditional 4 levels of interpretation, but as you know the three that go beyond the words do not do so in spite of the words. The literal interpretation is good and holy. Your invocation of ‘literalism’ (as opposed to the literal sense) has a more negative connotation in our culture today, suggesting something bad we need to get beyond. I wholly agree with you that the ineffable must not be excluded in our account of reality, but I would insist that neither should the material. Whatever the “literalism of earthly life” denotes in your mind, that too is carried up in the physical body of Christ ascending to his Father.
I appreciate your careful reading. Perhaps I could have been clearer, but I certainly don’t want to exclude the material.
‘Then let the last loud trumpet sound / and bid our kindred rise. Awake ye nations underground / ye saints, ascend the skies.’ (the unwritten last verse!)
Thanks for the additional verse!