Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on what "the feast of the Ascension wants to teach us"

From
Images of Hope: Meditations on Major Feasts, in a chapter titled, "The Beginning of a New Nearness":

You
are surely familiar with all those precious, naïve images in which only
the feet of Jesus are visible, sticking out of the cloud, at the heads
of the apostles. The cloud, for its part, is a dark circle on the
perimeter; on the inside, however, blazing light. It occurs to me that
precisely in the apparent naïveté of this representation something very
deep comes into view. All we see of Christ in the time of history are
his feet and the cloud. His feet—what are they? We are reminded, first
of all, of a peculiar sentence from the Resurrection account in
Matthew's Gospel, where it is said that the women held onto the feet of
the Risen Lord and worshipped him. As the Risen One, he towers over
earthly proportions. We can still only touch his feet; and we touch them
in adoration. Here we could reflect that we come as worshippers,
following his trail, close to his footsteps. Praying, we go to him;
praying, we touch him, even if in this world, so to speak, always only
from below, only from afar, always only on the trail of his earthly
steps. At the same time it becomes clear that we do not find the
footprints of Christ when we look only below, when we measure only
footprints and want to subsume faith in the obvious. The Lord is
movement toward above, and only in moving ourselves, in looking up and
ascending, do we recognize him. When we read the Church Fathers
something important is added. The correct ascent of man occurs precisely
where he learns, in humbly turning toward his neighbor, to bow very
deeply, down to his feet, down to the gesture of the washing of feet. It
is precisely humility, which can bow low, that carries man upward. This
is the dynamic of ascent that the feast of the Ascension wants to teach
us. 

Read another excerpt from the same book, "Primacy in Love."