Giotto, 'The Ascension'. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

‘The ascension of Jesus … becomes a celebration of the extraordinary fact that our humanity in all its variety, in all its vulnerability, has been taken by Jesus into the heart of the divine life …. [The] Ascension is a celebration of the glory of humanity, the unlikely possibilities of people like you and me, the eternal potential locked up in our muddled struggling lives. And a celebration too of God’s capacity, through his Holy Spirit, to reach into those parts of humanity that are so far from glorious, that are rebellious and troubled and broken, to breathe through them, to take them home, to drop them into that fire and melt them and recast them. The promise of the Father is that we as Christians will receive that level and dimension of divine life that we call ‘Holy Spirit’, so that, like Jesus, we will find that nothing human is alien to us. And the promise of the Father is that by the love of Christ spreading through us and in us, the world may be brought home to Christ, who brings it home to his Father’. – Rowan Williams, ‘A sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the Ascension Day Sung Eucharist’.