Jesus has ascended, vanishing from the sight of His disciples and of us, yet instead of lamenting this departure, almost instinctively, there is a sense that we, like those same disciples, are to pray, to pray and to wait, in the same way His disciples did when they returned to the upper room in anticipation of the coming of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the arrival of the Holy Spirit.

We are being called to prepare, to make our hearts and our minds ready for the coming of the Holy Spirit, to focus our attention upon the endurable gifts of Heaven and not on those that pass so quickly in our lives.

These are not the gifts that the world can give, as Jesus so beautifully reminds in our Gospel today, but those that bring lasting joy and peace, gifts borne out of love from the one who loves us, as St. John says in our second reading, the very gift of the Holy Spirit.

And, by these gifts we enter into the very heart of the Trinity, no longer content with what the world wants to give us, but consecrated and given over to truth itself, that which is spoken in the enduring Word of God and that which we celebrate every day in the Eucharist and in all of the sacraments that Church has given us as a means to draw closer and closer to Him.

For, as a famous commercial once reminded, “good things happen to those who wait,” and patience in this sense will be worth it, because we are not just waiting for the sake of waiting, we are now waiting for the very gift of God Himself, He who is love, He who calls us to remain in Him as He remains in us.

For, that is what we are to pray for, that is what Jesus prays for us in our Gospel today, that we are in His presence and protected by Him, that we are being drawn from the world, as it were, to the Heavenly world, where there is a place waiting for us if we but make the effort.

For, as Hebrews reminds elsewhere, and with which I leave you with today: “we have here no lasting city, but seek the city which is to come.”