Today is the least-known and most confusing Holy Day on the formal Christian calendar. At least, that's been my experience.

Officially it is called The Feast of the Ascension.  It is what most people think happened at Easter: Jesus is taken up into Heaven.  

But Luke-Acts doesn't tell it that way.  According to the good doctor, apparitions and companionship with Jesus continued for forty days after his death, and only then was he wafted into the clouds.  

This ambiguous interval known as Eastertide matches what grief science now teaches: people don't lose sight of their lost loved one immediately.  Whether it's a pet or a person, our minds and hearts expect to see it in all the old familiar places and only a gradual tutelage dislodges that expectation.  It never completely goes away.

Hence, I find Ascension is one of the clearest tests of whether one is a humanist or a messianic Christian.

For a humanist like me, this is a grief season.  The loved one is gone.  My life must go on without its beloved source of strength, comfort, joy, companionship, everything.  And where it's going to go isn't always clear.  Ascension is thus the testing time in a covenant.  

Perhaps your partner no longer enjoys the activity that for years has constituted your date night.  

Perhaps your child is no longer the bouncy, beautiful, confident and accomplished elementary scholar you know, but has started showing those first popping signs of puberty.

Perhaps a beloved minister has announced her retirement, begun her sabbatical or been taken sick -- something that means you won't be having the same old Sunday ritual that you love.

Ascension comes in a thousand different ways.  It is always a testing time for covenants.  I have found Ascension -- times when my life was in an ugly and financially draining transition -- has brought my loved ones closer.  Perhaps that is what people mean when they say "hard times is when you find out who your friends are."

But its community isn't only human.  Every religion I know has stories about our covenants with nature.  When Prince Gautama was so upset by the suffering around him that he left his family and palace to sit under a tree and meditate until he could understand it, birds and beasts and plants worked in magical ways to keep his body alive.  We need hardly mention the temptations of Moses and Jesus as parallels, as well as the gift of manna by which God sustained the Israelites in their wanderings.  I don't know enough about the lifeof the Prophet Mohamed (PBUH) to find a parallel, but I am betting that he had a journey or isolation in which the desert and its Allah came through for him.  And for Christians, Ascension ends with a celebration of nature: after ten days of claustrophic hiding, a fresh wind blows into their locked up room.  They were so relieved that exagerrated stories grew up around their natural liberation -- speaking in tongues, words that flamed, a sermon that went on a whole day.

But back to my Christian meditation on human relationships.  This year Ascension has been major and personal with me.  I've been struggling to come to terms with some kind of neurological anomaly that maifests as some kind of learning disability.  Of course, at 54, I've been up against these limitations again and again.  In the past, they have always marked the beginning of a self-imposed Ascension, a time of frustration with covenant.  And in the past I've always run away, thinking there was something unique about this job, this person, this community, that would not apply in another location.  Only five decades of running have been able to teach me that the problem is somewhere inside me.  So this time, instead of running, I am grasping the new science and entering the diagnostic journey.  Ascension will not really end for me until I find the combination of medications and cognition trainings that stop me from this running and living in fear.

For my beloved communities, this has always been a time of surprise and pain.  But Ascension is ultimately, a resurrection story.   Each time I have run, I have arrived at a place where my same old strengths and interests and character immediately kicked in.  Sometimes I like this and sometimes I don't -- but it always makes me feel at home.  This, of course, is the common Christian understanding of Heaven -- a place where the person we know ourself to be gets reunited with the loved ones this person most wants to be with forever.  And I know these advances in science will let me be more fully who I am, in service and companionship more faithfully with those I love.  At this stage in life, that has a major component of healing those severed relationships.

For they are the ambiguity of this occasion: the loved ones don't get to go to Heaven right away.   No matter which gospel you read, the community goes back to Jerusalem and struggles to visualize life without this loved one.  If the community story is central, you follow them through to Christian Pentecost -- a new way of living as covenanted community -- and long years of work and suffering before they each achieve their own resurrection.  Ascension for them is a poignant lifelong interval of waiting to be reunited with their lost leader. 

So is Ascension really a feast day or a day of quiet mourning?  It isn't Good Friday, whose pain and direction are clear.  For me, it's an occasion, each year, to check up on my covenants.  Which of them are fading away?  Why?  Whither do they tend?

And what is my responsibility to them?  The first Christian leaders reassembled in one room until they could get a new form of inspiration -- the ever-popular Holy Spirit.  They didn't know much, but they knew they were bound together by what had happened the last three years of their lives.  That is what I am learning in my peripatetic ministry -- relationships go with me, no matter how many Ascensions my wounded ego invents.

So if your partner isn't excited about your familiar date night, Ascension is the time you awkwardly experiment with something else.  This is a time of danger -- either of you might well feel attracted to someone else who "feels more compatible."  That's why it's a testing of your covenant.

If your minister is moving on, this is your time to remind yourself which persons or rituals most elevate your spirit at community worship.  This is a time of danger -- you could well find yourself saying, "time to see what other folks do on Sundays."  That's why it's a testing of your congregational covenant.

if your child is struggling with puberty or some other life state transition, this is the time to step back in, hold them in an acceptable way, and help them see and interpret the new selt they are becoming.  This is a time of danger -- they've been thriving up till now when you stepped back.  That's why it's a testing of your covenant.

Each time someone enters Ascension, their covenanted loved one are forced to change as well.  Paul said we would all be "transformed"  and sermonizers are still having fun with what he meant.   The Cambridge Platform has a much more modest term: "mutual edification."   Only in coming and going together, walking together along life's challenging pathways, will we finally each bring out the best in each other.  

This is the purpose of covenant.  By theological definition (we are flawed, life breaks us all, we are particularly placed in society, we have gender or economic limitations, we are born to sin -- take your pick) we cannot bring out the best in our own selves.  

Covenant is the commitment by others to help us as we struggle with that effortl  Sticking with the covenant when they come into Ascension if our assurance that someday they will do the same for us.

And as we do this together, this world will be made better because we have lifted up each other.