The Ascension and the Curtain We Refuse to See

A previous post was right to diagnose a starved imagination: modernity trains the eye to treat the world as stuff, not sign—and so Christians begin to speak their own faith like tourists reciting a phrasebook. The distinction between image and idol is the hinge: an idol arrests the gaze (“this is all there is”), while an image releases it (“this is more than itself”).

But there's a further fasting of imagination that even “Christian Platonism” can accidentally intensify if we're not careful: we can treat “above” as a polite synonym for “elsewhere,” and “spiritual” as a euphemism for “not really there.”

Platonism can rescue us from flatland; it can also tempt us to escape the earth in the name of loving heaven.

The Ascension refuses both temptations.

It's Christianity’s rude insistence that a body has gone into heaven—not as a metaphor, not as a temporary costume, but as a glorified, physical reality. If that's true, then “heaven” can't be merely “non-physical,” as though God dwelt in a mist beyond matter. The Ascension forces a cosmology that modern secularism can't even draw without embarrassment: the world isn't a closed machine, and heaven isn't a remote province accessible only by the soul’s private migration.

Notice how the New Testament often speaks not of Christ “coming” as a traveler crossing distance, but of Christ appearing—as though the decisive event isn't a change of location but an unveiling. “When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Colossians 3:4). And again: “what we will be has not yet been made known… but we know that when Christ appears…” (1 John 3:2).

The verbs are theatrical, not logistical: revelation, not mere relocation.

Here's the metaphysical scandal: heaven and earth aren't rivals; they're the two halves of a single good creation meant to interlock. “Above” isn't a second floor in the same building, nor a distant galaxy; it's the hidden side of reality—near enough to press against us like a wall we’ve forgotten how to touch.

Modernity turns the cosmos into an aquarium: glass everywhere, meaning nowhere. And then, because we can't bear to live in an aquarium, we smuggle in fantasies—political utopias, technological salvation, the religion of “progress”—thin transcendences that promise everything and deliver only better lighting.

The biblical imagination is stranger and more demanding: not “leave earth for heaven,” but heaven coming to earth by disclosure, until what is already true becomes visible. The Christian hope isn't a soul’s evacuation plan; it's the final healing of creation’s split perception. (Even our best devotional language can betray us here: we talk as if God is absent and occasionally visits, rather than present and occasionally recognized.)

Picture a curtain in a familiar room—your kitchen, your parish, your own chest. You keep mistaking the curtain for a wall. So you build your life as though the room ends there: ambitions pressed flat against fabric, prayers reduced to interior monologue, sacraments treated as “helpful reminders.” But the Ascension says: the curtain isn't the edge of the world. It's the seam where the world is joined.

This is how we supplement the call for Platonism: yes—recover participation, recover “levels,” recover the sense that the visible points beyond itself. But also recover something more stubbornly biblical than Plato’s ladder: not the soul rising away from matter, but matter destined for glory; not an escape from earth, but earth’s opening into heaven.

If Christians are confused here, it's because we've quietly adopted a modern cosmology: the universe as a sealed container, plus a religious add-on called “heaven” where souls go. That view can borrow Platonic language while remaining basically secular in its architecture. It keeps the modern picture of reality intact and asks faith to live in the margins like a hobby.

The Ascension doesn't live in the margins. It redraws the map.

So the imagination we need is not only the imagination that sees signs in things, but the imagination that can endure a world where the sign is not merely symbolic but ontological—where the “more” is not our projection but God’s proximity. This is why silence matters: not because we need private serenity, but because noise makes the curtain look opaque.

One last, uncomfortable implication: if heaven and earth are designed to overlap, then the Church’s life isn't a religious society inside a secular world; it's a kind of borderland practice, training attention for the coming disclosure. Liturgy, sacrament, prayer, and holiness aren't “spiritual activities” in a non-spiritual universe; they're rehearsals in realism—learning to live as though the curtain is thin.

And perhaps this is the sharpest irony: modern people congratulate themselves on being “realists,” yet they can't make sense of the Ascension without turning it into metaphor. The Christian is asked to attempt the opposite: to treat metaphor as a mercy, but reality as the main offense.

If Christ’s body is in heaven, then heaven isn't “elsewhere” but “otherwise”—and the world isn't empty, only undisclosed.

What would you have to stop calling “impossible” in order to start calling it “hidden”?