Staying Awake through Our Desire
Yes, Christ did ascend upward and from on high sent the Holy Spirit, but he rose upward because this was more appropriate than to descend or to move to left or right. Beyond the superior symbolic value of rising upward, however, the direction of his movement is actually quite incidental to the spiritual reality. For in the realm of the spirit heaven is as near up as it is down, behind as before to left or to right. The access to heaven is through desire. He who longs to be there really is there in spirit. The path to heaven is measured by desire and not by miles. For this reason St Paul says in one of his epistles, “Although our bodies are presently on earth, our life is in heaven.” Other saints have said substantially the same thing but in different says. They mean that love and desire constitute the life of the spirit. And the spirit abides where its love abides as surely as it abides in the body which it fills with life. Does this make any more sense to you? We need not strain our spirit in all directions to reach heaven, for we dwell there already through love and desire.
The Cloud of Unknowing
The Cloud of Unknowing was written in Middle English by an unknown mystic of the fourteenth century.
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