CHURCH NEWS News from the Three Valleys team On 26 May we celebrate Ascension Day, another event in fact in the series of incredible episodes associated with Jesus’ life. The Book of Acts says: 9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. 10 They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them.11 “Men of Galilee”, they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” Where did he go? What really happened? Sceptics tend to dismiss this as just another story too hard to credit. Strangely perhaps, I have always found that people familiar with science fiction stories, which are often based on genuine concepts, accept the ideas behind the Ascension more easily than many religious people do. I wonder if this is because they are used to the mysteries of science, particularly ideas of alternative realities. Acts tells us that Jesus went back into Heaven. Belief in those days located Heaven in the sky. Today, though we still don’t really know much about Heaven, our concepts of it have much more in common with these ideas of alternative realities than of a location in the sky. In many ways our understanding has turned a full circle because on the cutting edge of physics there are all sorts of exotic and, to most of us, hardly believable theories about what reality is and the place of humanity 56
Our Church communities within it. If you don’t believe me, just put terms like the ‘Anthropic Principle’, ‘the Holographic Universe’ or ‘Super Symmetry’ into your Google search engine and see what comes up. Stick to reputable ones like the New Scientist or Scientific American and you will be astonished at what you read. You might even find some of your doubts about what was going on at the Ascension will suddenly melt away. Perhaps it is enough to say that Jesus did indeed go to the ‘other’ so that he could still be with us today. We do not need to know what that other is.
Rev’d Tony Gilbert Team Rector Three Valleys Benefice
