For God all the dimensions of existence lie open before him like some hazelnut in the palm of His hand. No wonder He can appear in locked rooms and ascend from view. This is what Our Blessed Lord can do with ease. His earthly ministry finished, He ascends, stepping out of the small piece of reality to which we are confined, to stand "outside" it all to be with the Father. Quite what this "outside" is we can't know or understand: the only possibility that our human minds can reasonably deduce is that this "outside" is God Himself.
This seems as absurd to the human mind for which time and position, size and weight, concrete and abstract are the framework of our understanding what reality is. If St Thomas Aquinas is correct and the simplicity of God renders Him identical with His Divine attributes, then this must go against anything that we can understand of our own reality and our own being. And yet, it is God Himself who gives us the framework of understanding in the poverty of our fallen existence. It is God who gives us objectivity whereby we must ascend out of very ourselves in prayer and in consideration for others.
While we must rejoice in the colour of life that our subjective experience gives us, the existence of God is an objective reality upon which we cannot impose any of our subjectivity, but must rely on how He reveals Himself to us. If we want to know God, then we must learn to ascend to Him in the practice of prayer and doing good things according to His Will. This will necessarily take us outside our own perceptions of what is.
As God prepares us for life with Him, that process being Salvation through redemption, justification, sanctification and glorification, so do we become more fully us by letting go of that which we believe defines us and does not. All our labels and self-descriptions are nothing: in the beginning, all God creates us to be is man and woman to live with Him in the Garden of Eden.
Our Lord ascends, and in so doing we forget about His face though we glimpse it through the ikon. We forget about what He eats or wears; we forget about his size and shape; we forget about all those psychological, sociological, and political labels with which we may have confined our thinking about Him. What remains of Him for us is the Word, now two-thousand years distant. Yet, the Word stands outside, and thus always is what it is. What we are to receive is the Holy Ghost binding us to the outside by bringing that outside within us so that our earthly knowledge of our self becomes just a shell - a shell that will be discarded when we too ascend.
Thus, the Church can never be "the Modern Church" because "modern" is part of the shell to be discarded. If our Faith is not of Eternity, then it is nothing and to be thrown off. If our Faith roots itself in the here and now, then it will be left there and come no further. If we want a Faith that changes with time, then we have no faith at all because Time itself will be discarded on the Outside. "The Modern Church" is a selfish institution, introspective and self-satisfied, accepting the limp and frail aspects of ourselves as the only things that must be included. There is nothing of Eternity therein, just empty words, empty logic, and empty comfort.
Yes, the Church must be radically inclusive, because it must include what really is, and separate it from the Hell of being insubstantial. It must accept people as they are, casting away their labels, and allow them to change by casting away their labels for themselves. It is the radically inclusive Church that helps human beings become the men and women they were created to be in God by helping them ascend to the Outside, an Outside that lies within. That ascension has been gifted to us in the Ascension of Our Lord.
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