Salvador Dali’s painting “Ascension” is certainly one of the most provocative paintings depicting the Ascension of Our Lord Jesus. The symbolic elements are many, the speculations even more, and the agreement on meaning is still up for grabs. But I sometimes tend to focus on some of the more realistic elements cast among the surrealistic things. While the art experts discuss the finer points of Dali — his life, faith, and his work, I am fascinated by perspective, as well as the hands and feet. The former as though clutching at something; the latter soiled and showing the wear and tear of life on earth. Continue reading
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The Ascension of the Lord is a great celebration of the Church. It commemorates the bodily ascension of Jesus into heaven. According to St. Luke it occurred 40 days after the Resurrection (Acts 1:3). It is a feast of great antiquity with liturgies and art of the 4th century already addressing it as a norm of the Church. In the Eastern Church this feast is known in Greek as Analepsis, the “taking up,” and also as the Episozomene, the “salvation from on high,” indicating that by ascending into his glory Christ completed the work of our redemption.
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In the course of my MBA studies, professional career, life as a priest, and all the points in between, I have witnessed and participated in conversations gone wrong. “What we have here is a failure to communicate” (Captain, in Cool Hand Luke). I have studied instantiated and uninstantiated communications, message and meta message theory, and a whole host of topics whose names have been lost in the course of time. It seems as though communications is a mathematical stew of thousands of variables and a limited number of equations… translated: there is no one solution. At best you can hope to reach an optimal answer given a particular starting point – it won’t be perfect, but it will hopefully work. 
One of our Bible study folks asked about the reference in The Letter to the Galatians to St. Paul’s time in Arabia. I had always wanted to post something on the topic – and now I have an immediate request to do so. The problem is that we don’t really know a lot of biographical information about St. Paul – at least not in the sense of modern biographies.
The name “Hester Ford” probably does not ring a bell. She died mid-April (2021) in Charlotte, NC. Theodore Roosevelt was President of the United States when she was born in 1906 (might have been 1905; the records are unclear). The covid-19 pandemic was not her first. She lived through the 1918 influenza pandemic. She lived through two world wars, saw aviation go from marvel to the everyday, witnessed the age of radio then television and then the internet. She witnessed lynchings and Jim Crow. As a black women she knew prejudice and intolerance, but saw the Civil Rights movement begin to make some inroads. She lived long enough to see 21 Presidents – she marveled and was joyous when a Black man was elected President of the United States – something she never expected.
Clayton Schenkelberg
