I am tempted to require the front office, if someone wants to see me, to ask the visitor, “Are you still alive?” Am I serious? Yes — more or less.
I had a visitor a few days ago. When my secretary mentioned his name, I could not place the person. But soon I recalled that he was a security guard who was often sent by his boss to the office, which I shared with another lawyer when I was still practising law. At one time, a woman called up asking for someone we did not know, and kept doing this despite being told that she had dialed the wrong number. Exasperated, I told the security guard to pretend to be the person and talk to the caller. Which he did, and they seemed to hit it off.
Now he had stepped out of the mists of time. I told the secretary to show him in. Sure enough, it was the same guy. He was delighted that I still recognized him, although he looked emaciated. Without delay he explained his gaunt and shabby appearance. He blamed it, rather puckishly, on his having married a much younger woman. But suddenly, after mentioning his wife, his mien changed from mischievous to earnest, as he showed me a clutch of RXs, and let on that his wife was ailing, and, although she was now somewhat on the mend and would be going home after a few days in a hospital, she would have to continue her medication.
This was the reason why he had come to me, to ask help. He left the security agency after he got married, and brought his bride to live with him on top of a mountain. I asked him if he was growing tomatoes — in fact I informed him that not far from his place farmers were growing tomatoes, not caring that I had changed the topic and had not been listening to him and all the time had been thinking only of tomatoes, and this was because, between you and me and the bedpost, years ago I passed by a hut whose floor was completely covered by tomatoes, which enthralled me even as I wondered where the people of the house slept.
If I was wool-gathering again, I was brought to my senses, or more appropriately jolted out of inattention, when I heard what he said. After handing to him my modest financial contribution, I asked him, when I learned the name of his home barangay, where, in case I should happen to be near there, I could find him. “The cemetery,” he said.
This took me aback, and rather apologetically he explained that there were people who lived near the cemetery who could direct me to him.
Soon he said goodbye and I probably would not see him again. As an old Irish priest said, when I told him that someone I knew in the seminary had died, “We’re all just really coming and going.”
But does one disappear to reappear somewhere else? Certainly, this is the case of Jesus. Luke ends his Gospel with an account of Jesus’ leaving. He led the disciples out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. “While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven.”
The disciples were not sad. Luke writes that they “returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God.”
Why with great joy? Because, aside from the fact that Jesus promised to come again, as St. Leo the Great wrote in a sermon, “[O]ur Redeemer’s visible presence has passed into the sacraments.”
I wouldn’t have given the visitor a piece of biscuit, because it would unduly evoke a scene reported by Luke when, after he had risen from the dead, Jesus appeared to his disciples and, aside from showing the wounds in his hands and feet, he asked for something to eat, and was given broiled fish.
After he ascended into heaven, to prove that he has not left at all, that his presence among us is as real as ever and has not ever diminished, Jesus gives us something to eat — his very own flesh and blood in the Holy Eucharist.
The Ascension was a paradox — Jesus departing in order to stay. What a sight it must have been — the Lord being carried up into heaven. The sky was not clear — we read in the Acts of the Apostles that a cloud took Jesus out of sight. Was there just one cloud? Perhaps, and this would be consistent with the marvellous — there was likewise an appearance of angels — the sky was effervesent with nimbuses, many of which — as my strange visitor sees from his mountaintop during sunset — might be round and red and glowing like tomatoes.