[AI translation] Dear brothers and sisters, the event that happened 40 days after Easter and 10 days before Pentecost has the peculiarity of directing our thoughts, our souls, our hearts, our attention, our gaze upwards, from earth to heaven. From the visible to the invisible, from time to eternity. From here, amoda. From here to there, as we heard in the Word just now. The ascension of Jesus is not only a historical fact, but also a great pointing upwards, which reminds us of what I read in the passage, "seek those who are above, where Jesus is, seated at the right hand of God", and "care for those who are above, not those on earth". Brothers and sisters, I know very well how difficult it is for a person to get to the point in his life where he takes this warning of God to care for those who are there seriously. After all, we all, without exception, start this life with little interest in what goes on up there. We are so occupied with things here - with earthly things and their problems - and we are so satisfied with what we can achieve here, with what we can achieve here, that there is simply no room left in our hearts, in our lives, to seek, to search for and to deal with things here. We have all got the veil of our lives so deeply entrenched in this earthly world that it is as if we were to live here forever and want to stay here forever, and therefore all of heaven is almost out of sight.In the midst of all our earthly worries, we forget that we are all actually on our way to heaven, that we are all on our way there, wittingly or unwittingly. Our plans, our thoughts, our aspirations, our desires and our wishes are directed almost exclusively here, towards earthly things. We have such desires that one person wants to get as much money as possible, to be as rich as possible. The other may want to be liked, to be beautiful. A third wants to stay young, a fourth wants to build a house, and so on. He wants to get a good job, to secure influence for himself, to gain prestige in the eyes of people. Things like this and similar worries, plans, desires, aspirations fill one's life to such an extent that one simply does not miss, at least for a while, those certain things up there, those certain heavenly things. Later on, as time goes by, one begins to feel more and more that something is missing in one's life, even if everything one has thought of, aspired to and desired has succeeded. And how much something begins to be missing from one's life when, as they say, one becomes a fated person; and one can be so unbelievably stupid that one tries to make up for and satisfy even the ever-increasing sense of lack by collecting and hoarding things from here and there. It is as if one were to quench one's burning thirst with sea water: the more one drinks of it, the thirstier one becomes.
It often happens then that the attention of a man who has become so rooted in the earth is then stimulated by the consciousness of the approach of death to turn at last to eternal things. Just the other day an ageing man came to see me and told me that he was now over 60. At that age, you never know when your life will come to an end. He now felt that the time had come, as he literally said, to get down to religious matters. Well, that's the way we are, brothers and sisters, we all like to put off doing things upstairs. Or, what is even more common, when we hear this exhortation to take care of those who are up there, we say that we would, and we would love to, but somehow we are so busy with these earthly things that we simply have no time for anything else. We don't have time to deal with eternal things. Lately, brothers and sisters, I have been more and more preoccupied with a saying of Jesus, which goes like this, "redeem the times, for the times are evil". And the fact that the times are evil, or that the days are evil, does not at all mean that something terrible is happening in this earthly world, in this temporal existence. It does not mean at all that we are living in difficult times - difficult times have never been to the detriment of the life of faith - but it means that time has a nature, a property: it passes, and it passes very quickly. It runs out, flies away and disappears irrevocably. The hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years, the decades pass by. The older we get, the more we realise the accelerating pace of life and how fast time is passing us by. And the events of world history fill our time, our lives, with worries, hopes, and sometimes with a little bit of joy. We are forced, quite simply forced, all of us, to care a lot, to care so much about earthly things that our time is wasted, and then sometimes in a penitent pause we feel as if time, this rushing giant, has stolen the occasions from our lives and has not allowed us to care enough, to care enough about things above.
Or do you think you care about what's upstairs? Can you even call the few minutes a day you spend in silence before God "caring"?! Caring, brothers and sisters, means something like a long and intense occupation, an occupation so intense that you get tired of it. Or caring can also mean that one is working at something. And I really don't know whether there is anyone among us who would work so hard for the things of the kingdom of God, who would work so hard to put the spirituality of Jesus into practice in his daily life. Is there anyone who would break himself for this? To care also means to strive, that is, to overcome obstacles and to make sacrifices of all kinds and to strive towards some definite goal. Or, as one of the new Hungarian translations of the same verb says, 'to give your attention to what is above'. So this attentiveness means some big, serious attention. Attention to the guidance, direction, advice of the invisible Jesus, attention to influences from an invisible world is what this care means. And since it is very difficult for us, for ourselves, to get, or even impossible for us to get, to really begin to care seriously about those above, God is sometimes forced to do what is in our own interest to gradually lead us, to force us, to begin to care a little more seriously about the eternal, about those above. I stress that we should start to care for our own sake.
I read once - I am sure you have heard it, or many of you have heard it - that a shepherd once tried to move his flock across a deep valley, across a raging stream, because he found much better pasture for his sheep on the other side. But all his efforts were in vain, the timid sheep and lambs stopped before the rushing stream, they dared not wade in, and try as he might, all his efforts failed. At last he had a good idea: he picked up a little lamb and held it close to him, then he bent down again and picked up another little lamb in his other arms, and with these two innocent little animals he himself waded into the rushing stream and crossed to the other side. When the older sheep saw that their little ones had been taken from them, they at first bellowed and staggered on the bank, but then they finally got up the courage to plunge into the stream and crossed it, and so slowly and happily the whole flock made their way to the other side, where the shepherd found better pasture for them. Well, brothers and sisters, this is how the Good Shepherd, our heavenly Lord Jesus Christ, sometimes does with His sheep. When he sees that someone does not want to listen to him in any way, when a kind word is not enough for someone, then it happens that he takes a little lamb from him and takes it to the other side, because otherwise there may be some who would not care about the things on the other side, who would not follow the shepherd. But when they see that he has taken someone away from them, then perhaps with a great gasp and a great cry they themselves will go on towards the place where they saw their little dragon disappear from sight. There are many, dear brothers and sisters, who, by calling home a loved one, have been warned by God to "seek those who are there, and care for those who are there". Have you never felt that the more people who have gone away from you - to the other side, to the other side of that great dark river - the more threads are woven between you and the other world? You almost feel that they are waiting for you over there.
But dear brothers and sisters, this is not the greatest and most decisive attraction in our lives, but the ascension of Jesus. For it is he who now connects us not only by emotional ties but also in reality, who connects our lives with that other world, with those who are there. So Jesus going to heaven does not mean that he has gone away from us somewhere far away. On the contrary, it means that that other world, the invisible world, imagined as very distant and unimaginably mysterious, seems to have come closer to us through him and become more real for us. This is what Jesus brought closer to us with His ascension and made more real for us. We never imagine heaven, brothers and sisters, as being somewhere far away, out of reach: the heaven into which Jesus entered - I would like to say, where Jesus "entered invisibly" - has the quality not of being far away, but of being intangible, invisible to our earthly senses. Otherwise, if someone were to ask me where heaven is, I would say here. Here, here, here - everywhere. Everywhere "here", and always "here". Because let us not imagine, brothers and sisters, that the process of time is moving through a long course of centuries, millennia, millions of years, and that when this long line comes to an end, somewhere in there eternity will begin. It is not like that, but somehow it is eternity that carries us through our temporal existence, our earthly existence. So in such a way that our earthly world, our temporal world, is equally close to every point of eternity, heavenly world. That is why Jesus' ascension into heaven was precisely the fulfilment of the promise that "I will be with you always, even to the end of the world". He is with us, not only in memory, and not only in his teachings, but he is with us himself: real, personal, and just as real, and just as personal, as when he walked among us in the flesh, on this earth. There are only two differences: one is that we saw Him then, and we do not see Him now, but He is just as real. The other difference is that then He could only be present in one place at a time, since He Himself lived among us in a time-bound form of existence, and now He can be present in all places equally, at all times, at all times, from that very form of life of another dimension. And when it says, "Seek those who are above, where Jesus is, at the right hand of God", it means something like trying to seek Him here on earth with the gaze of our souls, of our faith, and to grasp Him. So we try to walk, to live, to work among people on this earth with our eyes fixed on Him. In a way, we try to seek Him in the same way as a man groping in the dark seeks another's hand to hold it - because it is not for Him that we need to seek those who are there. This is what we need, brothers and sisters, because it is part of the very essence of our human life to be stretched between two poles: between earth and heaven, between the physical and the spiritual world, between the visible and the invisible world. The balance of our whole human life is provided by the fact that, walking and living in this earthly whirl, we cling to the hand of Jesus, which reaches down from above. In a way, it is as if, on a tram, as it twists and turns, one stands safely if one holds on to the handle that hangs down from above, because otherwise, on a bend, one might step on another person's foot, have a collision, or perhaps fall and hurt oneself, or fall through a window. In any case, we feel unsteady otherwise, and it gives us our balance, standing here on the ground, clinging to an invisible hand.
The orientation of our lives towards heaven does not mean that we are now alien, useless to the earthly world, quite the contrary. Caring for those who are up there shows itself to be a blessing for us first and foremost here, in our life on earth. The more seriously I care for those up there, the more clearly I see and feel and appreciate things down here. For example: first of all, I begin to see myself in a completely different way. I get rid of the self-enchantment that all people suffer from when they don't care enough about those up there, and I start to see myself as I am seen from up there, as I am seen from heaven. And in this vision, all pride and all imagined goodness melts away. And I shall see that I have only one excuse, the excuse of the most wicked of evildoers: the infinite grace of God, nothing else. And at the same time I begin to appreciate the other person differently. I'm beginning to appreciate the way they appreciate the other person upstairs. I see in him a brother, a comrade in arms. I see in him that he is no better than I am, no more than I am, but that by heaven's standards we are all sinners in need of mercy, both of us equally. And I begin to see events, earthly events, differently. Not from the back, as we always see it from below, but a little from the front, from where it is directed. A person who is concerned with things up there sees the problems down here from a different perspective, from a different point of view. That is why he is better able to navigate the various labyrinths of life on earth. He looks at the path of his own life a little from above, from where that blessed, dear hand weaves the thread of events with great wisdom and great love.
Doesn't it seem to you that from a greater distance you have a different view of things, a different view of the problems of the moment, than from a closer distance? He who is always concerned only with earthly things does not have this heavenly perspective, and no wonder that he then becomes entangled in his affairs and, seeing no way out, easily becomes despondent and despairing. The right guidance always comes from above, from the One who sees further than we see from here. And Who, therefore, knows very well why He leads the way He does. And knows well when and where one must arrive. And the man who cares about things above is not even afraid of death, because he knows that his way leads home through it. So, brothers and sisters, seeking and caring for things above is in no way a spiritual escape from the problems and realities of life on earth. It is not some fanciful longing for heaven, or some immersion in a sweet mysticism - in fact, it is very practical, for we seek things above in order to bring something down from there to earth. When one truly prays from the soul, prays with all one's heart, one is actually going to heaven in spirit, oneself. For all true prayer is nothing but a stop before the throne of the living God. And when we stand up from prayer, we are, as it were, returning from heaven to this earth again, and we do not come empty-handed. We bring something with us from there - that's why we look for those who are there.
So what are they up there? There is peace, true peace, true harmony. And from that peace and that harmony we can bring something into this world, into our homes, into our families, into our churches, into our society. Up there is purity, holiness. What a tremendous thing if we can bring something of that into this tainted world! Up there is true joy, goodness, love... So always like this, we return with a piece of heaven, we bring a piece of heaven into this earthly world. That's why we are looking for the ones who go there! Do you feel, brothers and sisters, that the whole celebration of the Ascension, when it tells you to look for and care for those who are up there, at the same time it almost directs our gaze back to earth. It is precisely Jesus' ascension that warns us to be strong, sober, and practical people on this earth. So the people celebrating the Ascension are not some fanciful idealists, but people who have been empowered to truly work for the glory of God and the good of their fellow human beings. They do not seek what is already on this earth, but they seek to bring into this earthly world what is not: the beauty of heaven, the goodness of heaven.
Therefore let us all pray in this way:
Lord Jesus, look down on me, let me not go astray;
Through the darkness to heaven, be thou the signpost.
Lord Jesus, look down on me when fear grows,
"When the shadows roar and the foe grips, be with me, my Savior.
Lord Jesus, look down on me, when the tide is out,
Thy holy serenity and eternal sunshine
(Canto 470, verses 3-4 and 6)
Amen.
Date: 4 May 1967.