I remember having laughed out loud when I learned the German word for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and, by extension, the word for the Feast of the Ascension. The words are essentially the same with a bit of name-substitution to distinguish between Ascension and Assumption: Christi Himmelfahrt (Ascension) and Mariä Himmelfahrt (Assumption.)

If you’ve studied German or enjoy picking words apart at the letter-by-letter level, you may think that the “false friend” at the end of the word “Himmelfahrt” was the source of my amusement. When you pull the “h” out of the word “Fahrt,” you get the false English cognate that has amused English-speaking learners of German for years. Every high-school German teacher in the English-speaking world surely wishes that they could ignore this word and the uproarious laughter and general mayhem that are sure to ensue in the classroom once the word has been introduced. Unfortunately, it’s hard to avoid teaching this high-frequency word that has nothing to do with its English lookalike, minus the “h.” (Yes, for the curious, the pronunciation of the German word is roughly the same as the pronunciation of its “h”-less English lookalike.) Unlike its English lookalike, the German word “Fahrt” and its sibling “fahren” crop up often in polite conversation. The verb “fahren” means to drive, to ride, or to go or to travel by means of [insert form of mechanical transportation; i.e., not a horse, donkey, etc., unless it’s pulling a carriage]. Meanwhile, the noun “die Fahrt” conveys a variety of meanings related to the concept of riding or driving. Common translations of “Fahrt” include the words “drive”, as in “how long is the drive?”, “journey”, “voyage”, “commute”, and “ride,” as in “how long is the ride?”

The third of the meanings that I listed above for the verb “fahren”—to go or to travel by means of [insert form of mechanical transportation]—was the source of my amusement when I learned the words Mariä Himmelfahrt and Christi Himmelfahrt. For a variety of reasons, one of which is that precise word-for-word, language-to-language translations rarely exist, I rely heavily on mental imagery to remember vocabulary in my second language. The mental imagery that I associate with “fahren” and “Fahrt” involves a school bus. This imagery helps me remember that “fahren” describes not only the act of driving various means of mechanical transportation but also the act of riding from Point A to Point B in various means of mechanical transportation. In the case of Christi Himmelfahrt and Mariä Himmelfahrt, Point A is the Earth and Point B is Heaven.

And now, in my mental imagery, there is a school bus involved in both Christ’s Ascension to Heaven and Mary’s Assumption to Heaven. More accurately, when I learned the words, my mental imagery involved a school bus. These days, the big yellow school bus has been replaced in my mind’s eye with the big blue and white Metro Transit buses that I rode for years when I lived in Madison. I invite you to imagine the bus of your choosing.

The bus at least sort of makes sense in the context of Mariä Himmelfahrt. In English, we distinguish between Ascension and Assumption precisely because we know that Mary did not rise to Heaven under her own steam; rather, she was bodily assumed with divine assistance. Sacred art generally depicts Mary as being carried to Heaven by angels. Clouds and rays of light are often involved, but generally not buses. Even still, the bus makes sense. Mary needed a means of transportation to Heaven. Why not a bus? I envision her Son in the driver’s seat. It’s an absurd image, but it’s mostly plausible for a 21^st-century audience.

The presence of the bus gets to be truly bizarre in the case of Christ’s Ascension. In rising to Heaven, Christ did not need the intervention of angels, clouds, rays of light, or a bus. Acknowledging the fact that Christ did not require a means of transportation to Heaven, my mental image of Christi Himmelfahrt obligingly relegates the bus to passenger status. In other words: the bus—being inextricably linked in my mind with the family of words related to the verb “fahren”—is still there, but it’s sort of being carried along by Christ, as if Christ is a hot air balloon and the bus is the basket in which others can ride.

Pretty ridiculous, right?

But at the end of the day, I wonder if my bus imagery is any more ridiculous than any other attempts to depict or envision the Divine? In posing this question, I distinguish between the person of Christ and the First Person of the Trinity: God the Father. While it is reasonable to envision or depict the human person who walked the earth as Jesus of Nazareth, it is perhaps not so sensible to attempt this task in reference to the First Person of the Trinity. The Creator of the Universe, the Alpha and Omega who was, is, and ever shall be, existing outside of Space and Time, is difficult to envision in human terms. And yet we try our best to envision this Love made manifest, for who wouldn’t want to embrace with all their human senses a manifestation of Love Itself?

But sometimes, in our strivings to envision Love Eternal and Divine, we end up excluding those whom we don’t know how to love, those whom we don’t want to love, those whom we have never met, or those whom we don’t understand. Sometimes, we end up seeing God only where we want to see God, and not in all the ordinary mystical places where God and Love reside. Sometimes, we end up seeing God only as we want to see God, and not in all the strange, scary, and unknown beauties of a Universe infused with the essence of the Divine. When our mental images of God begin to look more like we want them to look than like the diverse reality of life around us, those images become absurd. They become, perhaps, even more absurd than my mental image of Christ, Mary, and a bus ascending to Heaven. Worse yet, those images of a prescriptively familiar God become a stumbling block to living and witnessing the fullness of Life and Love.

May our vision not be clouded by fear of the different, the seemingly strange, or the new. May we recognize and embrace God in all of God’s Good Creation!

Where, in whom, or in what will you see the face of God today?

-Lori Randall, in pondering the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Other Imponderables

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