Since the bishops of this province have decided that the Ascension is to be celebrated on the Sunday following the traditional Thursday, this week we continue the usual Easter time.

Looking forward to that Ascension feast, as we do, we can but wonder how the disciples dealt with it. "Rejoice" seems to have characterized their first response, yet it surely was not long before a reaction set in and they were filled with a sadness softened only by the promise of the Spirit for an orphaned people.

One assumes they gathered — we know they did — and yet, during all the days after His rising they must have done the same, if not in the Upper Room, then in casual pairs or clusters to do what anyone would do: what you and I would do — they talked. They shared memories. Repeated what He said. And where He went. And what He did. They must have gone back over the three years and lingered long over the final ending. And the amazing Resurrection.

Oral history. The first beginnings of the Gospels. Told and retold, lingered with. It would only be later that the final summary would be put down in written form. All in some way under the Spirit.

One wonders, too, if in those first days they broke the bread and drank the cup. We do not know. Or were there other appearances that we do not know of? Perhaps to encourage, to cheer? And were they aware of the full nature of the Eucharistic meal? One thing is certain: they pondered and they prayed.

So it turns out how like them we are, and how like us they were.

For we gather, too. In small groups and large, in formal ones and in very casual ones. And do what they did. We remember. We tell the familiar stories once again. What He said and what He did. We pray.

And we do as they did. We break the bread of love and we drink the cup of salvation. And this has been going on for two thousand years.

And there is still no end to the pondering, the reflecting, the commentary. We try, as they tried, to deal with it all, absorb it, enter into it and be ever made new in it.

We call the whole business liturgy. They perhaps did not, but what was going on was the same.

That's why we can look on the New Testament as much a liturgical text as anything. It is the libretto, the script for the drama.

And though it is scarcely possible that they could have caught the full impact of what they were doing any more than we do, they must also have had the same subtle grasp that it was not mere gathering, mere talk, mere memory and recollection, the retelling of a familiar story in a setting of prayer.

For Jesus lives in the gathering as He lives in the Word, as He lives in the sacrificial Meal. And that we experience His presence in every such encounter is in some way no historical recollection, no memorial day, but both that and a fundamental more. We relive the original, or better, are present.

This could only unfold in time in the Spirit, the original unfolding of some lovely flower slowly opening to reveal glorious hidden beauty. In the beginning they must have had some sense of that, even if poorly defined and inarticulate. The coming of the Spirit would enlighten and guide all.

For time is also timeless. There is a dimension to our experience of Christ which is not hampered by time, limited by it. We enter into another reality in which the past is truly present and the present truly past.

I figure such insight is not so much the fruit of exceptional reasoning, as a matter of the heart where love reveals what the mind tries to express.

Until the end of time. For time is such a frail, fragile entity, so mysterious. A man picks up a stone in the road to the hill and tells me it's probably two million years old! We are immersed in an eternity we are part of, alive in.

And our whole experience of the Christian mystery is revealed in the passing of each year of our lives, a story told over and over, and entered into ever more deeply and fully.

And just as the original story involved ordinary people doing ordinary things each day of their lives and yet caught up in something quite beyond the obvious, so we: ordinary people doing ordinary things day after day, and yet walking the while with this immersion in eternity, in the timelessness that we will know fully when we enter into it wholly — which we will.

So we gather as they did. We tell it over again. As they did. And in the mystery of grace, of sacrament, of word heard, we not merely touch the eternal Christ, but hear Him, love Him, and are embraced by Him.

It's not a double life. It's a full one. For we are not merely mortal. We are immortal. And we live both mortal and immortal lives every moment we are on earth.

And as Christ left the earth for the life to come, so we, sooner or later. And do so with the prayer in Him and with Him that all may know that eternal life made ours to come in Jesus Christ the Lord.  Amen.