Ascension Day

Atlas Included in

11-11-2024 1654 words 8 min read

Contents

What Ascension Day Marks

The feast recalls two closely related New Testament passages: the end of Luke’s Gospel, which describes Jesus blessing his disciples at Bethany before being carried up into heaven, and the beginning of Acts, which sets the event forty days after the Resurrection and adds the detail of the cloud and the two men in white who promise the disciples he will return. Theologically the Ascension completes the story of Easter. Where Easter Sunday celebrates the Resurrection, Ascension Day marks Christ’s departure and his enthronement “at the right hand of the Father”, and it opens the ten-day wait for the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which begins the season leading to Whit Monday.

Why It Falls on a Thursday

Ascension Day is a movable feast because it is fixed to Easter, which is itself movable. Acts specifies that Jesus appeared to his disciples “over a period of forty days” after rising, and the Church took that number literally, counting forty days from Easter Sunday. Counting Easter itself as the first day, the fortieth lands on the sixth Thursday after Easter, which is why the feast is always a Thursday and why it wanders across the calendar between the end of April and the first days of June, depending on where Easter fell. This is the same moon-and-equinox rule set by the Council of Nicaea in 325 that governs the whole Easter cycle. In some countries and dioceses the observance is transferred to the following Sunday to make it easier to attend, a practice known as “Ascension Sunday”.

An Ancient Feast

The Ascension is among the earliest Christian festivals to be given its own day. Saint Augustine, writing at the turn of the fifth century, described it as being observed everywhere and claimed it was of apostolic origin, which — whether or not literally true — shows that by his time it was already regarded as very old. The pilgrim Egeria’s account of Jerusalem in the 380s and sermons by figures such as Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom confirm that by the late fourth century the fortieth day of Easter was widely kept as a major feast. Before then, some churches had commemorated the Ascension together with Pentecost as a single celebration of Christ’s glorification; the separation into a distinct fortieth-day feast reflects a growing precision about the Gospel chronology. The forty-day reckoning also shaped the architecture of the Church year. Because Acts places the Ascension forty days after Easter and Pentecost fifty days after, the ten-day interval between them became a distinct liturgical moment — the disciples, told to wait in Jerusalem, gathered in prayer for the coming of the Spirit. That interval is the origin of the novena, the nine-day cycle of prayer that became a fixture of Catholic devotion, and it gives Ascensiontide its particular mood of expectancy.

The English Rogationtide and Beating the Bounds

In the Western Church, Ascension Day is preceded by the Rogation Days — the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before it — a period of prayer and procession for the protection of the crops in the growing fields. Out of this grew one of England’s most enduring folk customs, the beating of the bounds. Parishioners, led by their priest, would walk the boundaries of the parish, striking boundary markers with willow wands and, in a memorable refinement, sometimes bumping or “beating” young boys against the stones so they would never forget where the parish line ran. The practice served a practical purpose in an age before reliable maps and land registries, keeping the collective memory of a parish’s limits alive, and it survives as a ceremonial event in a number of English towns and in the City of London to this day.

A Public Holiday Across Europe

Ascension Day is a public holiday in a striking number of countries: Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Indonesia, among others. Because it always falls on a Thursday, it produces one of the most reliable “bridge” weekends of the European year — in France and elsewhere it is common to faire le pont, “make the bridge”, by taking the Friday off as well and turning the holiday into a four-day break. In Germany the day carries a second, secular identity: it is Vatertag, Father’s Day, on which groups of men traditionally pull wagons loaded with beer and food out into the countryside for a day’s excursion, a custom that has grown well beyond its churchgoing origins.

How the Day Is Kept

In church, Ascension Day is a feast of some drama. In many traditions the Paschal candle, lit at Easter to represent the risen Christ, is solemnly extinguished after the Gospel reading on Ascension Day, symbolising his departure from the earth. Medieval churches sometimes staged the event physically, hoisting a carved figure of Christ up through a hole in the roof — the “Holy Hole” — while a figure of a devil was hauled down, to the delight of the congregation. Outside church the day belongs to the outdoors: processions, the blessing of fields, well dressing in the Derbyshire Peak District, and in some Alpine regions the driving of livestock towards their summer pastures. In parts of England there was a tradition that rainwater or dew collected on Ascension Day had healing properties.

World Variations

The observance takes on distinctly local colour. In Portugal, Ascension Day — Dia da Espiga — is associated with gathering a bouquet of wheat, olive, poppy and daisy, each element carrying a wish for prosperity, peace and health, kept in the home until the following year. In parts of Italy, children once released caged birds on the feast. In Venice the day was historically tied to the Sensa, the great ceremony of the Marriage of the Sea, in which the Doge cast a ring into the Adriatic to symbolise Venice’s dominion over the waters; a version of the festival is still staged. In Sweden and Norway the day is chiefly a quiet public holiday marking the near-arrival of the long northern summer.

Traditions and Symbols

The central image of Ascension Day is the cloud that received Christ out of the disciples’ sight, and with it the upward gaze — countless paintings show the apostles staring skyward at a pair of disappearing feet. The liturgical colour is white or gold, for the glory of the risen and ascended Lord. Wheat and the first green of the fields belong to the feast through its Rogationtide associations, and the willow wand of the boundary procession is its most tangible English relic. The number forty, recurring through the Bible — the forty days of the flood, of Moses on Sinai, of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness — gives the feast its place in the calendar and its sense of a completed period.

Fun Facts

The German Father’s Day tradition attached to Ascension Day has become notorious enough that alcohol-related accident figures reliably spike on the holiday, prompting periodic public-safety campaigns. Ascension Day is one of very few Christian feasts that is a public holiday in a Muslim-majority country: Indonesia recognises it nationally, reflecting the constitutional protection of its Christian minority. The medieval “beating the bounds” ceremony was taken seriously enough that in some parishes the perambulation route is still walked, occasionally requiring participants to wade through rivers or clamber over walls to follow a boundary laid down centuries ago. And the Venetian Marriage of the Sea gave the world a phrase still in use: the Doge would declare Desponsamus te, mare — “We wed thee, sea” — a claim of maritime sovereignty made new every Ascension Day for some six hundred years. In the Peak District village of Tissington, the Ascension is the traditional day for blessing the wells, whose elaborate flower-petal panels — a craft known as well dressing — draw thousands of visitors and are thought to descend from far older customs of thanking the springs for clean water in a limestone country where it could vanish underground without warning. The extinguishing of the Paschal candle on Ascension Day means that in churches following the older custom, the flame first lit from the new fire at the Easter Vigil burns for exactly forty days and no more — a small piece of choreography that turns the whole of Eastertide into a single sustained image.

A Closing Reflection

Ascension Day sits at a curious point in the Christian story — a moment of departure rather than arrival, an ending that is also a beginning of waiting. Perhaps that is why it has attracted such earthbound customs: the beating of parish boundaries, the wheat bouquets, the beer-wagon excursions, the wedding of a city to its sea. A feast about heaven has repeatedly been kept by paying close attention to the ground underfoot, to where a field ends and a parish begins, to the turning of spring towards summer. Sixteen centuries after Egeria watched the observance on the Mount of Olives, a great many Europeans still take the Thursday off without always recalling why, which is its own quiet form of continuity.

Written by Atlas

Writes vo.rs's calendar of special days and the stories of the people, places and curiosities behind them. Endlessly nosy about why we mark the dates we do, from solemn remembrances to gloriously silly food holidays, Atlas digs up the origins, the traditions and the odd fact worth repeating at dinner.