Transfiguration

With Lent comes the Lord’s invitation: to let ourselves be led up the high mountain where we become our deepest and truest selves. The mountain is prayer. It is there that we discover the call that is God himself. In prayer we get to know God and ourselves, for our true identity is nothing more than who we are in God’s desire for us. This divine desire—or will of God—is revealed in how the call takes shape in our particular circumstances, and so becomes our vocation.

If we consent to remain on this high mountain of prayer we will have glimpses, visions of Resurrection glory, of the Christ who transfigures creation. These moments will be short and obscure for they are only a touching of the hem of his garment, but they will also be beautiful beyond our own imagining and desire. They may also be frightening, for they call us to a new boldness and single-mindedness in following Jesus. But the vocation is not to be feared, for wherever it leads us, the call is only to him, to Jesus Christ, and to the life of the new creation that dawns in his Resurrection.


(Reflection prepared for our vocation office to post on its social media for the 2nd Sunday of Lent)

Updates

This old blog continues to slow down. Maybe it's over after eight (!) years. It's never really had a plan; I just wrote things as they occurred to me and since the Holy Spirit let me know that he was using it for my salvation and occasionally for the salvation of others, I was happy to continue.

But since it has been a while since I last wrote, I thought I would post some updates.

It's also the Second Sunday of Lent, a day dear to me on a couple of levels. The readings today are so rich; there's a sense of the first light before the dawn of a glorious blessing. Divine blessing promised for all the families of the earth through God's call to one man, Abram. The brilliance of the glorified Body of the incarnate Son revealed to the inner circle within the inner circle of Jesus' disciples. It's all what Paul calls the "grace bestowed...before time began."

There's your homily for today, the short version I suspect.

Prayer is good. There is something new in it, but I'm not sure how to name it. Some new level or call or surrender to the action of grace, I'm not sure how to describe it. There's also a new sense of what my priesthood means for prayer now that I'm living a more hidden life, as I pray for people especially in their suffering.

Spiritual reading is good too. I have the good fortune at the current moment to live under the same roof as the Capuchin Central Library. I've been reading volumes of the Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality series that I've always wanted to get to but never have. So far I've read Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and Richard Rolle. I was especially grateful for Tauler; one of those books for spiritual reading that Providence sends just at the right time. There's something eerily modern about him in the way he speaks about prayer as a descent, a going deeper, a sinking into one's 'ground,' rather than solely as an ascent.

For Lent I'm doing a couple of simple things in the hopes that they will help me surrender to the grace of renewing my baptismal promises come Easter. One is a funny kind of non-standard fast that I have thought of before but never tried. It's going well so far. The other is a little adjustment in how I use the evening meditation period, something to keep me focused on the basics.

So that's what I'm up to and that's it for now. Thanks for your prayers, as I pray for you.

Tents

Ever since I figured out that I was born on the second Sunday of Lent, the day has felt special to me. Not that it often falls on my actual birthday, but that's something I would prefer not to think about anyway. It only reminds me that I'm getting older without yet having made a solid start in serving God or doing anything with my life. But that's just pride, and in one of his uglier masks.

Transfiguration and Vocation

I have always been fascinated by the Transfiguration; I find it to be one of the most overtly mystical feasts of the year. As a resurrection appearance before the Resurrection, the Transfiguration reveals that in the Resurrection we are not talking about a historical event per se, but a manifestation of eternity become history. And when Eternity Himself becomes human history, He is revealed as utter Belovedness.

The Transfiguration has also been important to me in my own journey; I count this day as the anniversary of receiving my vocation to religious life. Imagine, then, my wonder when I later calculated that I was born on the second Sunday of Lent, when the Transfiguration is always proclaimed!

It's worth dwelling on for a moment, this idea of 'receiving a vocation,' and why I associate it with a particular day. People often ask questions about these spiritual moments, about how one knows that he has a vocation, or how one is sure about it.

So what do I mean by the moment of 'receiving my vocation?' All I mean is a consent to an internal invitation, a finding of the willingness to risk exploring an attraction and the courage to let other options begin to close in pursuit of it.

The invitation from God, when examined on the natural level, is a sort of attraction. The attraction to religious life can be made up of many parts, some natural and some supernatural, some wholesome and some immature. But in whole mess of 'weeds and wheat,' one experiences something inside that invites a look. On the feast of the Transfiguration in 1993, circumstances--Providence!--had set me up to help me consent to the invitation. I was about to begin my senior year of college, and needed a plan for after graduation. I had spent the summer praying and volunteering with a religious community. On the natural level it was easy for me to consent; I had nothing to lose and needed something to do anyway.

To consent to an attraction to religious life does not mean consenting to the whole vocation of being a religious; this has to be tested and explored. One may discover with delight--on the day of perpetual profession--that this original consent was indeed a consent to a religious vocation, but at the first moments this is not yet known. Many are called to explore religious life for a time without arriving at a final commitment; typically these are not failures or detours, but fruitful moments in particular journeys to other destinations. Religious life is like any relationship of the heart; it proceeds through deepening stages of intimacy according to mounting consent and vulnerability. These moments are institutionalized in the classic stages of religious formation: aspirancy, postulancy, novitiate, temporary profession, perpetual profession.

So if anyone discerning a religious vocation makes her way to this post, all I can say is let go of any interior urges to look for 'signs' or 'certainty.' These are what the flesh seeks because it doesn't want to risk anything for love.

Transfiguration

This weekend our pastor will be making one of our annual financial appeals at all the Masses, so I don't have a new homily to post. It's too bad, because the Transfiguration is one of my favorite mysteries of Jesus Christ. For a long time I've felt a sort of mystical affinity with it; it was on the feast of the Transfiguration in 1993 that I first consented to my religious vocation, and I was born on the Second Sunday of Lent when it is always proclaimed.

I often find myself including the Transfiguration in these posts, and so I just present three of my best:

The Resurrection, Transfiguration, and the End Times

Coincidence or Providence?

The Resurrection and the Bomb

Coincidence or Providence?

I think that a lot of people on the spiritual journey have had an experience that can be interpreted as either coincidence or Providence. We meet a spiritual mother or father who has the exact wisdom we need at a certain time. We come across the precise spiritual book that helps us forward. A homily seems to speak to our precise spiritual concern. A holy card in our pew or on the floor in church seems like it was just for us.

Are experiences like this coincidences, or little acts of Divine Providence arranged by the Holy Spirit for our benefit? People ask me that sort of question all the time. To be honest, I don't think how we interpret them matters so much. What matters is that prayer has freed us just a little from distraction and misery and made us sensitive to the superabundant goodness of God that is always around us. Little sparks or seeds of God's love are all around us all the time; most of them we miss because of our distraction, much of which is necessary in order to fulfill the work and acts of love we are called to each day.

Here's my favorite example from my own life: For whatever reason I have always had a certain attraction to and spiritual affinity for the mystery of the Lord's Transfiguration. It has always fascinated me as a sort of Resurrection appearance that precedes the Passion, given to a select, inner circle of the disciples. Praying the mystery, I'm led into its mystical, precious, and glorious light, what you would call in Latin, praeclarus.

If I had to pick a day for receiving my religious vocation, it would be the feast of the Transfiguration in 1993. Not that there was anything grand about it, but I remember praying that day--in a chapel dedicated to the Transfiguration--and finding the grace to consent in a concrete way to my desire and interest in pursuing a vocation to religious life.

So it was a delight and a wonder for me to one day calculate that I was born on the second Sunday of Lent, on which the Lord's Transfiguration has been proclaimed for as long as anyone can remember.

Is this a coincidence or an act of Providence and destiny? To me the question doesn't really matter. Everything that exists is a sort of co-incidence of the love of God and the creation that overflows out of that love. Prayer is the discipline that allows the Spirit to train us to see ourselves and the world as this perfect and mystical "coincidence."

Transfiguration

I really love the feast of the Transfiguration, and I've often reflected on it in these posts. To me it's just one of those very mystical feast days. In the same spirit I really love the Epiphany and the Presentation/feast of Candlemas.

To me the Transfiguration reveals that the Resurrection is not a historical event but a transcendent force. If it were merely a historical event, how could this Resurrection appearance--and surely it is one--occur before the Lord's Passion?

God makes use of the humanity of Christ to break into time and space. Raising this humanity to new life by the Spirit, this inbreaking arrives as the Resurrection of the Lord. It is the transcendent joined to the time and space of creation, or, more scriptually speaking, the marriage of heaven and earth.

Transfiguration

Friend Ben in Denver raised some questions for reflection about the Lord's Transfiguration, coming out of the second Sunday of Lent. In my homily I made the point that the Transfiguration is a preview of the Resurrection, so Ben perceptively asks how it is also a preview of the coming of the Lord at the end of time. He also asks--and this is very interesting in other ways--how the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the feast of Transfiguration in 1945 are perhaps related to the revelation this feast commemorates. I've been thinking about these two things for a few days.

I would say that the Transfiguration is just as much a preview of the Resurrected Lord (as Jesus' first disciples would experience him) as it is of the Lord who will come again at the end of time. I say this because, in my best understanding, the Resurrection of the Lord we celebrate at Easter and the arrival of the Lord at the end of time are really the same thing. In the development of the understanding of the people of God--especially between the Testaments--the Resurrection was always an event that marked the end of time. Thus, when Jesus is Risen and the experience of him as risen encourages the disciples to gather together again and bravely proclaim his gospel, this is a sign that the end of time has, in a sense, already arrived. Recall the Lord's basic proclamation, "the Kingdom of God is at hand!"

The Resurrection is the "end"--in both the sense of terminus and the sense of purpose--of time, breaking backward into history, just as Jesus himself is the eternal Word of God breaking into history, time and space. The good news of the Resurrection is that this glorious and hopeful conclusion and goal of history is now present in Jesus Christ, and, as he promised, is drawing all things--and time itself--to himself.

I'll save the atomic bomb for the next post.