Ascension: stay with your feet on the ground and your heart turned to the sky

Reflections of a believing queer person

"Men of Galilee, why are you watching the sky?"(Acts 1,11)

Sometimes I feel exactly like them: with the nose up, to fix a sky from which I wait for answers. And instead the ascension asks me another thing: not to escape, but to fully live my story, my body, my desires, my faith.

As a queer person, for years I have lived as if my being should remain at the bottom, hidden, not very presentable before God. I thought that to love God I really had to go up ... get on my identity, overcome it, deny it. And instead now I understand that Jesus who ascends does not invite us to escape from the earth, but promises us that the sky is already in us when we learn to love each other as we are.

Ascension, for me, is a threshold. A "not yet" full of promises. It is the moment when Jesus leaves ... but not to abandon us. He leaves to give us space. To say: "Now it's up to you".

It is up to us, also for us, even excluding us, to rewrite the history of salvation. It is up to us to be his witnesses "up to the borders of the earth" (Acts 1,8).

Anche se quei confini spesso coincidono con le nostre ferite, con i luoghi dove siamo stati respinti.

Rileggere l’Ascensione oggi, come persona LGBTQ+, per me vuol dire questo: accettare che la vita spirituale non è solo attesa del cielo, ma cammino sulla terra. È capire che la presenza di Dio non sparisce quando il cielo si chiude: cambia forma. Diventa Spirito, soffio, respiro, presenza che ci accompagna, ci libera, ci manda.

E allora sì, posso alzare gli occhi al cielo, ma con i piedi ben piantati in questa terra che mi è stata data da abitare.

Con tutta la mia verità. Con tutte le mie domande. Con tutto l’amore che posso dare.