The Face of Mercy / Daniel Conway

Let’s keep our eyes on heaven, but our feet on the ground

Pope Francis has a way with images. He knows just how to make the teaching of Jesus practical for us. He brings the message of the Church home to us, and applies it to our daily lives.

Last month in one of his weekday morning homilies at the Casa Santa Marta (the Vatican guest house where he lives instead of the traditional home of popes, the Apostolic Palace), Pope Francis said that we Christians are called to keep our eyes on heaven but our feet on the ground. With this image, the pope makes Christian spirituality something very practical.

The Holy Spirit comes into our hearts to help fulfill our longing for the Risen Jesus who is now in heaven preparing a place for us. By the power of God’s grace, we recognize heaven as our true home, but like the first disciples, we are not permitted to just stand there gazing heavenward.

We are called to be missionary disciples—witnesses of Christ’s resurrection who are sent throughout the whole world to proclaim his victory over sin and death. The power of the Holy Spirit enables us to be bold and courageous in our joy-filled proclamation that Christ is risen and we have been set free.

When Jesus ascended into heaven, he did not cut himself off from us. “Physically, yes, but he is always joined to us by interceding for us,” Pope Francis says. “He shows the Father his wounds, the price he has paid for us, for our salvation. And so we must ask for the grace to contemplate heaven, the grace of prayer, the relationship with Jesus in prayer, that in the moment he hears us, he is with us.” This is the heavenward gaze that characterizes faithful Christians, the confident hope that drives us forward to union with our Lord.

But Pope Francis is uncomfortable with any form of spiritual stargazing. Christian life is active—as well as contemplative. It moves us beyond our comfort zones “to the peripheries,” the margins of human culture and society where too many people live in exile, without the hope of Christ and without the aid and comfort of Christian disciples.

At the time of his Ascension, Jesus said to his disciples: “Go into the world and make disciples.” Pope Francis repeatedly tells us to “Go!” We are not to sit still or to stand by silently gazing at the heavens. “Go: the Christian’s place is in the world in order to proclaim the Word of Jesus, in order to say that we are saved, that he is come to give us grace, to bring us all with him before the Father.”

So, we might say that Pope Francis sees Christians as people who look beyond the here-and-now, but who never lose sight of the fact that we are called to action, to make a difference in the world here and now.

“A Christian must move in three dimensions,” the pope says. “First, we must say to the Lord, ‘Don’t let me forget the moment when you chose me, don’t let me forget the moment we met.’ Second, we must pray, looking to heaven because he is there, interceding. He intercedes for us. And third, we must be sent on mission—not necessarily to the foreign missions—but, rather ‘going on mission’ is living and bearing witness to the Gospel, it is making Jesus known to all people. And doing so through witness and through the Word: because if I tell people about Jesus, and about the Christian life, and then live like a pagan, that won’t do. The mission will not go forward.”

May we always look to heaven while remaining grounded in the mission to proclaim the Gospel through our words and our actions here on Earth!
 

(Daniel Conway is a member of The Criterion’s editorial committee.) †