To say, “I believe in Jesus Christ…who ascended into heaven” is to say, “I believe in the mystical dimension of life….”

Awareness, the first mark of the contemplative, brings us face to face with the holiness of life. Dualism with all its separation of spirit and matter, heaven and earth, reason and feeling, light and dark, lies to us about the nature of creation. Life is not two substances—one spirit, one matter, one good, one evil—joined together on the tether of a fragile human breath. Life is two dimensions of one creation, integrated and brimming with the Divine in one another: “See these hands, look at these feet, touch these wounds,” the Risen Christ says and yet manifests all of them now in a new dimension, the magnitude of which “eye hath not seen nor ear heard.” And yet some have.

To the contemplative, the entire world is sacramental. Everything speaks of God. Everything unveils God to us. The true contemplative is a naturalist, a lover of life, a respecter of persons, a diviner of the tangible who sees behind the masks of creation to the Creator.

Dailiness is the stuff of contemplation. The contemplative does not go looking for stardust in which to discover God. The contemplative sees God in the clay of the day. Here in the struggles of marriage and unemployment, of dissension and jealousies, of rejection and the broken shards of trust, the contemplative sees the Jesus who showed the way beyond the crucifixion to the Ascension, beyond suffering to the glory of wholeness.

Jesus came to be among us. Jesus walked the earth and blessed it. Jesus lived the life of the living and grew in “wisdom, age, and grace” here. But Jesus raised our eyes above and beyond the narrow limits of our paltry little lives, showed us other horizons, gives us a world beyond our ourselves. In the end, out of the dregs of the worst the world has to offer, the Creed lifts our eyes and our souls to the vision that transcends the pedestrian—He ascended into Heaven. The Creed brings us face to face with the mystical and reminds us to abide there all the while we walk the streets of the world.

The Creed is right. “Jesus ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God” and I can, if I look hard enough at everything in front of me, find him there.

—from In Search of Belief by Joan Chittister