It is not an overstatement to say the Ascension of Our Lord has garnered to itself a considerable array of bad art, the worst of it having to be anything depicting feet disappearing into a cloud. It might have something to do with the difficulty in portraying something that isn’t part of the normal round of human life, but I wonder if it isn’t more to do with our not having a particularly well-developed understanding of what the Ascension is all about. As with the French word for ‘lift’ or ‘elevator’ being ascenseur, we can see how easy it is to get stuck in an up there, down here conversation that fails to grasp the real significance of what this most glorious of feasts is all about. Perhaps the ancient office hymn for the day might help us out. Eternal Monarch, King most high includes this terrifyingly brilliant verse:
 

Yea, angels tremble when they see
How changed is our humanity;
That flesh hath purged what flesh had stained,
And God, the flesh of God, hath reigned.

So, as well as being the exultation of Christ to the right hand of the Father, the Ascension is also fundamentally about the glorification of human nature, the reunion of man with God. It is the very entrance of human life into the inexhaustible depths of the Divine. You can listen to the hymn by clicking here, sung by the choir of Ely Cathedral in an evocative and remarkable remastered recording from 1958

Another piece of music that has become almost indispensable from the canon of English church music is Gerald Finzi’s God is gone up. By the end of the 1940s, Finzi was something of a musical celebrity, his compositions as evocative of place (for many, his work has a particularly ‘English’ quality) as any by Parry or Vaughan Williams. Unlike other near-contemporaries, his work is never - I think - diminished by sentimentality: there is an original voice here, that may have been influenced by the Jewish-Italian background of his parents. The anthem, one from a set of three, takes words from the seventeenth-century poet Edward Taylor’s Sacramental Meditations, and was first sung, not so far away, at St Sepulchre’s, Holborn in 1951. There is a joy here, an ebullience, that captures perfectly this great feast of the Church.
You can listen to it by clicking here.


And finally, to get us all singing, here is Crown him with many crowns
click here to listen.