The Feast of Feet

Ascension Day is this coming Thursday. It’s a Holy Day of Obligation, and we’ll have Mass for the feast, but it’s not one of the popular feast days; most Christians will spend Ascension Day not knowing it is Ascension Day.

But I love the feast, though it may seem to be for an odd reason. I first came to love Ascension Day because of the Holy Feet.

Since the Renaissance, most classic paintings of the Ascension of Christ show him seated on the clouds, surrounded with angels; all the Apostles are standing below, looking up at Him as He sits in splendor. El Greco, Rembrandt, Titian, Michelangelo—everybody who was anybody during the Renaissance painted the Ascension. Each one followed the same pattern.

But in the Middle Ages, that wasn’t so. They had a more earthy, palpable view of the Faith than those who came later. Medieval paintings and manuscript illuminations of the Ascension show the Apostles standing and looking up. But they don’t see a Levitating Jesus—or at least, not all of Him. The Apostles are shown looking at the bottom of the Lord Jesus’ feet. It’s all you can see, because the rest of Him is already taken up into the clouds.

I first loved it because I was a boy and I thought it was a lot more fun than all the stuffy, uninteresting depictions of the Ascension as an excuse for the Great Artists to showcase their talents. But I loved it because it seemed more real. If this really and truly happened, the Apostles would, at some time, have been standing their looking up at the soles of their Lord’s Holy Feet. I loved it then, not quite understanding why. I love it just as much now—because it’s so wonderfully sacramental.

God did become one of us. “Like us in all things,” St Paul reminds us, “excepting sin.” In one of his sermons preached on Christmas Day many hundred years ago, St Cyril of Alexandria poked at the same truth: “God wore diapers for our sake.”

The Lord Jesus’ feet stick out from the clouds on Ascension Day to tell us “it’s true! He did come. Really come like you and me. He’s been through the wringer, just like each of us goes through it—and He went back “to prepare a place for us.”

I love Ascension Day. I love it’s truth and I love its depiction. ‘Cause it means someday (deo volente) my feet, and yours, too, will be sticking out from the clouds.—Fr Gregory Wilcox