Around the time we celebrate the Ascension of Our Lord, I always think about the famous sketch of Peter Paul Rubens depicting Our Lord rising up to Heaven while his feet are dangling down. The whole image is foreshortened so that the head is disappearing and the feet become the most prominent feature. The sketch was a preparation for part of a much larger painting he made on the ceiling of a church in Antwerp. Painted in 1620, the church was destroyed in a fire in 1718. The sketch survives (it’s held at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna) and it’s so fascinating even in its unfinished form that it’s often included in collections of artwork about the Ascension.
The foreshortening of the perspective is dramatic, and I have to wonder what it would have looked like standing in the original church and craning my neck upwards to see it on the ceiling. It’s painted in such a way as to give the illusion that the viewer is literally standing underneath the rising Lord. As such, his most prominent feature is his feet.
The dangling feet are a long-running oddity in sacred art. Picture after picture of the Ascension depicts the befuddled disciples staring upwards at Christ, who has slipped out of the frame. All the viewer can see is his feet. The Ascension, clearly, has taken the disciples by surprise. They have nothing left of their Lord to hold onto.
[See article below for a selection of Ascension images.]
When I think of the rarefied air of serious spiritual contemplation, I rarely envision that air to be filled with a pair of unshod feet, and yet, this is precisely the image that the sacred art tradition presents to us. What is it about a pair of departing feet that deserves our attention?
Odd and striking
The Bible is actually full of references to feet. Blessed are the feet of those who bring the good news. Mary Magdalene breaks a jar of perfume and washes the feet of Christ. Later, he washes the feet of his first priests on Holy Thursday and, in fact, will have nothing further to do with them if they won't allow him to do so.
I really like artistic symbols and poetic images that are odd. Some poetic images are so deeply ingrained in our cultural consciousness that they’ve become quite familiar. Roses are beautiful. Violets are blue. But feet are weird and shaped funny. They make for an odd and striking symbolic image, so the fact that they’re used with sneaky frequency in art and writing grabs my attention.
In St. John’s Gospel, there's a moment of confusion after the Resurrection when Mary Magdalene first encounters the Risen Lord in the graveyard. At first she doesn’t realize who he is, but once she does she falls to the ground and wraps her arms around his feet. “Do not cling to Me,” Jesus says, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” He gently separates from her grasp. Those divine feet are no longer meant to walk earthly soil.
The Risen Christ strides the earth like a giant. He bursts from the frame of the picture and his glory spills out into the sky and clouds and into bread and wine and into you and me. He towers over creation like the rising Sun. We remain below, craning our necks and watching him disappear. His head is already in the clouds. All we grasp is his feet but, as he makes clear, at some point we have to let him go.
There’s a hidden sorrow in the Ascension. Christ must leave. He will no longer spend his days with his friends strolling through villages, sharing meals, and engaging in profound conversation. He has fished with them for the last time. They’ve shared their final Passover. They won’t get to walk with him and talk with him anymore. It reminds me of how, the day my parents dropped me off in my dorm for freshman year of college, my mom cried. She was happy to let me take the next step towards adulthood and maturity, but along with that was the heartbreak of sending yet another of her sons out of the home. Those years spent together as a family are precious, but they are not meant to last forever.
Until one day
The painting of Peter Paul Rubens embodies the dynamism of this loss. Even though it’s a still-scene, you can feel Christ slipping away. Now that I have children of my own, with one about to be married and leave the home and another preparing to go away to college, the same feeling of loss is inside me. I wonder if, the rest of my life, I’m going to be chasing after my children who have flown the nest, trying to recover something of the life we all had when they were young and small, the days they all slept together in a big pile on a mattress, not because they didn’t have beds of their own but because they wanted to be near each other. I cherish the days now with my children who are growing into adulthood and will soon be on their way. I’ll never take for granted the chance I get to fight with them for control of the coffee pot every morning.
We cannot become prisoners of the past, though. These good and healthy developments in our lives, the way our children grow up and make homes of their own, the new places life takes us, even our pilgrimage to chase down the departing Christ, all of these necessarily create separation but the paths we follow nevertheless trace out unbreakable lines of connection. Our love allows us the strength to let each other go, and it is our love that will bring us back together.
Our Lord assured his disciples that even though they would be apart for a time, the journey to find each other again would make their relationship stronger than ever. If he was leaving, it wasn’t because his love was cold but because he wanted to prepare a permanent home for his friends.
Even if life is a series of departures and we find ourselves, like the disciples, mourning the absence of those we love, there’s always the promise that the feet are following after the head. So we stay on our journey, love each other the best we can. Put one foot in front of the other and trust that, someday, every departure becomes an arrival.
