Forty days into the Easter Season we celebrate the Ascension of Jesus into Heaven. In this reflection, we move from a click to a conscience, from a swipe to a place where “quite different things are going on”.
I made a big mistake. I clicked on a reel on Facebook. I shouldn’t have done it. But I couldn’t resist. I’m sorry. I’m embarrassed to admit it.
But I clicked on a video of kittens. It was lovely and cute and, well, kind of cuddly. I’m a cat person. So I thought it was harmless enough.
And now Facebook thinks the only thing I’m interested in is kittens and cats and furry things.
Don’t get me wrong. I do like kittens and cats and furry things. I’m a cat person.
But that’s all they’re giving me now.
One click on a cat. And cats is all I get.
I’m inundated.
With cats.
I think of others who may have clicked on other things. Young people. Vulnerable people. Any people. Those who click on one thing and then the algorithms define them and send them more. And more. It builds. They become what the algorithms think they are and want.
The algorithms swell their timeline. Lure them in, flood their vision with stuff and more stuff. More unsavoury than the last. But they never take the blame. The conscience lies in the click not the commerce.
And so the experience becomes narrow. Nebulous. Narcotic.
Who defines us and feeds us? Influences and fashions us?
Perhaps, unwittingly, we have placed ourselves at the whim of others. Forgotten who we are. Been too willing to be defined and destroyed. Gaslighted and grounded by others.
And yet the Ascension of Jesus lifts us beyond the banal control of others. Sets our sights above, on Heaven. Liberates us from the narrow limits of other’s perceptions of who they think we are.
How do we measure our lives? How we look and eat and love and act. How we wake and sleep and want and need. What we believe, how we grieve. How we shop and how we bleed.
Do we need to place ourselves at the whim of too many self-help books and living guides, look up too often to the influencers and social media moguls whose minds are set on money not our mental health? Be besotted too much by the ‘Tiktoking’ quick witted, fast scrolling way of a world that think it knows it all?
But yes, of course, we learn by the lives of others, are shaped by the lessons they learned although, at times, we rarely learn. We lean in on their stories, connect ourselves to them, and try to make a new start inspired by their bravery and their very human lives. Yes, we need the lives of others and their learned lessons. There are so many waiting to be discovered. Inspired and inspiring.
When Jesus disappears from the Apostle’s sight it could be a case of smoke and mirrors. The cloud and mist embrace him. The magician’s sleight of hand plays tricks with our story of faith, contents us with the way we want it to go, makes everything so tidy. Get through the pain and this will happen, a holy moment, well worth waiting for.
And yet the mirror comes from the heights into which we look, and ‘The Kingdom’ he had come to proclaim where, as RS Thomas wrote in his poem of the same name, “There are quite different things going on: festivals at which the poor man is king and the consumptive is healed: mirrors in which the blind look at themselves and love looks at them back.”
When we stop scrolling or flicking left and right, upload the last picture of our Sunday lunch, or retake that selfie again to get our image just right, we can always simply look upwards to find another vision where love looks at us back, where festivals favour the poor, where the consumptive is king.
“It’s a long way off” continued RS Thomas in his poem, “but to get there takes no time and admission is free, if you purge yourself with your need only and the simple offering of your faith, green as a leaf.”
We live in an imaginary instant world where we have no time, and where we expect so much for nothing. Our free socialising on social media actually comes at a cost. One which we are still waiting to discover.
“Why do you stand here looking into heaven?” the dumbfounded apostles are asked by those white robed figures as Jesus disappears from their sight.
It’s a good question. On what do we set our sights? What images do we see? Kittens and cats and furry things and whatever the algorithms define, more unsavoury than the last? Our timelines give testimony to our life in the post modern world. Or do we seek or really savour other things?
There is a place where “there are quite different things going on.”
The Ascension of Jesus lifts us beyond the banal control of others.
Sets our sights above, on Heaven.
Liberates us from the narrow limits of other’s perceptions of who they think we are.
And maybe gives us another view, a different image, of how our life can be.
South Cardiff Ministry Area 
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