Ozark Airlines

A Boy’s Lesson on Christ’s Ascension

By Fr. Frederick Edlefsen

In the 1970s, we occasionally went to New Orleans airport for travel or meeting grandma.  With a boy’s eye, I inspected the logos and names on the planes.  Most suggested destinations, like Eastern, Southern, Texas International, Delta, Piedmont, and United (I assumed United just meant it went everywhere).  

My fifth-grade imagination took off.  Where did that DC-9 called Ozark go?  I looked up “Ozark” at the end of the “O” section in our World Book Encyclopedia.  I learned of a new world.  Ozark was a mountain range, about 500 miles north-northwest of homebase, in exotic frontier lands called Arkansas and Missouri.  At dinner, I asked dad how the Ozark Mountains got their name.  Always a comedian, he said their first explorer was a guy named Zark, whose helper cried out “Oh Zark!” when he first laid eyes on the mountains.  

Fact check: Hernando de Soto first explored the Ozarks in 1540s.  His Iberian pigs were razorback progenitors.  “Ozark” derives from the French “aux Arcs” (“to Arkansas”), an old trading post.  

What lies beyond horizons fearfully invites discovery.  It’s like birth.  We’re launched into the Uncertain.  When we pass from mom’s womb, we cry and scream, “What’s out there?”  Every child confronts an unknown world.  Our final birth, a passage from the womb of a familiar Earth into the world of an unfamiliar Heaven, is what we call death.   

Inevitable facts provoke questions. What’s beyond death?  Christian faith says there’s “a new heaven and new earth.”  What’s that?  Our reassurance is Christ’s Ascension.  

“Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with human hands that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God's presence” (Hebrews 9:24).  “He was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9).   What’s the “cloud”?   

The “cloud” through which Christ ascends and returns is a veil through which human knowledge, exploration, and conquest cannot pass.  Human achievement cannot penetrate it.  No one can claim what lies beyond it.  Only Christ does that, on our behalf.   All who are “in Christ” by way of Grace may pass through this “cloud” into the New World.   

I once watched a DC-9 named Ozark pass into a cloud.  I was a boy, watching a mystery go to a mystery.  And it would return.