This is Cardinal Francis George. I invite you to join me for the next two minutes to reflect

with Father Robert Barron on the Word of God, which is the Word on Fire. Word on Fire, Catholic

Ministries, is a non-profit ministry at the forefront of Catholic evangelization, using

new media to spread the faith and every continent. Father Barron challenges us to open our hearts

to the Word on Fire, which is God's Word of Love for each of us. If our hearts are open,

the Lord can change and transform us so that we might speak with love about the one who

is love. The global benefactors of Word on Fire with the support of the Archdiocese of

Chicago now present Word on Fire. Peace be with you.

Francis would come to the wonderful feast of the Ascension of the Lord, which celebrates

the journey of the risen Christ into heaven. We affirm the fact of the Ascension every

time we recite the Nicene Creed. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand

of the Father. Now, can we even begin to make sense of any of this in the early 21st century?

Doesn't all this sound rather pre-scientific, rather mythological? Jesus going up to heaven,

going up into the sky in an embodied state. Wouldn't he still be somewhere within the measurable

cosmos? And then, what does any of this have to do with us? You say, well, this extraordinary

thing happened to Jesus, but why would we be bothering with such a peculiar event? Well,

the key to understanding this feast and this doctrine is to recover a Jewish sense of

heaven and earth. You see, Willie Nilly, most of us are Greek in our thought patterns. By

which I mean, we set up, as Plato taught us long ago, a rather sharp dichotomy between

the material and the spiritual, between the realm of appearance and the realm of true

reality, between this fleeting earth and the permanence of heaven. You know, we all read

in high school or college, the parable of the cave from Plato's Republic. There we are

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