Almost 200 years ago Sydney Smith, a waggish clergyman, gained a reputation for satirical repartee — his famous definition of Heaven was “eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets”. Inundated with correspondence, he complained that it was “like smallclothes before the invention of suspenders . . . impossible to keep it up”. On another occasion he declared that he now firmly believed in the apostolic succession because the dogmatic Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, was “so like Judas”.

Smith was also a perceptive pastor. Writing to a close friend suffering from what we would now call depression, his “Cordial for drooping spirits” is an example of sound, pastoral advice, from one who was no stranger to times of inner darkness. Among its ingredients are “amusing books”; having “short views of human life not farther than dinner or tea”; not expecting too much of human life, “a sorry business at best”; “keeping good blazing fires”; not to be “too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice”; “make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them fully: they are always the worse for dignified concealment”; “be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion”.

Depression, literally a pressing down, is a lowering of vitality. It can lead to, or be a symptom of, that deadness that the Fathers of the Church called accidie, which is often translated as “sloth” but is more accurately a morbid weariness that sucks us down into an encircling gloom that distorts and colours all our relationships.

Although we know this personally it can also grip a society. Bishop John V. Taylor wrote of it as the “sleeping sickness” of apathy in which growing up can mean a closing up, a choosing to be less alive in order to be less bothered. The posturing of politics, insensitive intrusions into personal lives, the reduction of complex situations into dramatised and oversimplified conflicts, are all symptoms of this lifelessness induced by fear.

Taylor also noted how this general condition was described in the Letter to the Ephesians (iv, 18, 19): “They live in the emptiness of their minds, their wits darkened, being estranged from the life which is in God through the incomprehension that is in them through the stony hardness of their hearts. They are those who have ceased to feel.”

It is significant that one of the earliest and most universal texts of the Christian Eucharist is the dialogue that begins the Eucharistic prayer. The priest exhorts the people: “Lift up your hearts.” The response is: “We have them lifted up to the Lord.” The heart in the Bible is not primarily the place of feeling, but of willing and choosing. The people have prepared by penitence. They have acknowledged their need of the God who reaches out to them in grace and forgiveness. Now they are to lift their whole being to the heavenly places in giving thanks to the Lord who is risen, ascended and glorified.

When, next Thursday, the Church celebrates Ascension Day, the exaltation of Christ, His taking up into glory, it is a celebration of the Lordship of Christ over the world, His triumph over sin and death, and the new order in which “the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ”. He ascended, the Letter to the Ephesians tells us, “that He might fill all things”. The reality in which we are called to live is not the dead weight of sin pressing us down, but the grace and life of the Spirit of the living God who catches us up to glory. As Christopher Wordsworth wrote in one of the great Ascension hymns: “There we sit in heavenly places; there with Him in glory stand.”

The Ascension is the triumph of the victorious love of God in Christ, from which nothing can separate us. More than a cordial for drooping spirits, it is indeed that in which we share every time that in worship and adoration we lift our hearts to the Lord.

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe