Tuesday, Day 45: Olives

The various versions of the Ascension put its occurrence in different specific locations, but the icon includes olive trees in the background, apparently favoring the version that occurs on the Mount of Olives.

The Mount of  Olives was then, and is now, a place of burial that draws pilgrims of many faiths.  Churches, temples, and mosques have been built at certain key places on the mountain, including three churches dedicated to the Ascension—Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, and Lutheran—as well as the dome of the Ascension, now a part of a mosque.

Olives are a staple in most Greek households, no matter where they ended up in the diaspora. They are one of the few truly delicious foods that can be eaten during Lent, even during Holy Week. Any Greek grocery in any country in the world will feature a wide selection of fat olives, all salty and distinct in taste.

And the olive trees in Greece—I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. A week away from leaving for Greece, I know one of the first noticeable signs that I’m going back will be, as the plane descends on Athens, the olive groves surrounding the city—shimmery silver-and-green. I can’t wait to see them. I also can't wait to taste the olives in the vats, the fresh oil. 

When I look at the icon, though, the trees are hardly beautiful. They look like Dr. Seuss versions of olive trees—tufts of leaves among rapidly painted branches. They simply are not meant to be the central image of the icon. They are there, perhaps, to demonstrate just how high in the air the floating Christ really is, and to remind us we are in a place of planting, harvest, economy, life. 

The center of the image is the Theotokos, who isn’t actually mentioned in any of the versions of the story. She’s standing still, looking directly into our eyes, just as her son seems to be. The others depicted in the icon are either looking up or at least other, talking about what they have seen, worried and shocked looks on their faces. But not the Theotokos. She is surrounded with white light, angels on either side of her.

On Good Friday, we sang heart-wrenching hymns about her grief. Now, we imagine what it must be like for her to be present in this familiar place, some 40 days later. It is a place that represents suffering to her people, where prophets are buried. It is also where her son was arrested. It is a place that represents peacefulness and beauty, a shady reprieve from the city below. It is on the way to the temple, a path well traveled. It is a place of growing and harvesting.  

St. Paul, who at this point stands in strong opposition to Christianity, who definitely wasn’t there, stands beside her, looking straight up, fearful.

Clearly, the icon isn’t about historical truth. It is about how we, the church, meet again and again in familiar places to relive the story of Jesus, which is a story that transcends time, a story that makes sense only in the context of other stories. That’s why Paul shows up long before he believed in Jesus. It’s  why the manger is also a tomb in the icon of the Nativity. It’s why, in the icon of the Assumption of Mary, Jesus appears beside his mother’s grave holding a baby version of her in his arms. It’s why the baby Jesus always looks creepily like a little adult, why he is doing things that are clearly un-baby-like: holding a scroll or blessing us or looking toward us even in the version I like best in which his cheek is pressed against his mother’s.

But back to the Ascension: we gaze at the icon and recognize ourselves there, too, in that historic, blessed, storied place. We are the villagers who ascend to bury our dead. We are the villagers who ascend to harvest the olives, whose hands know how to store and season them, or how to make them into oil. We are also the soldiers that arrested Jesus, and the disciples who fled from his side.

And we return as all of these people to this place, again.  

We can show up from the future and stand in total awe, gazing upward, frozen in time, like Paul.

We can choose to cling to those around us in the present, whispering about how scared we are, looking to each other to make sense of what we’re experiencing, like the disciples.

Or we can be like the Theotokos: still, totally present, at peace. We can realize this is just one of many stories that will happen here. We can move slowly and honestly through our grief. We can breathe in our fear, and breathe it out again. We can look forward rather than backward, or up, because we know that is the direction we’re called to move—once we have our bearings. We can have the confidence that the story we know so well and have loved so long will continue to make sense in new ways as we keep walking.