Today is Ascension Day – the day that we celebrate Jesus’ return to Heaven and the start of the 10 day period to Pentecost and the arrival of the Holy Spirit.  It is both a goodbye and a hello – because it is a moment of unification, a moment when Jesus goes ‘universal’ precisely because he is no longer physically present.  It is a paradox that, like the disciples who find themselves staring into empty space, we have to understand that in the absence is also the presence.  I love this poem from R S Thomas which sits in this space and cleverly weaves around the absence and the presence in both spirit and secular (using science) and thereby demonstrating that God is there in all places.

It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter

from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
I modernise the anachronism

of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews

at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resources have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?