Today is Transfiguration Sunday and how apporpriate that it come in the midst of Lent... the second Sunday of Lent! Luke 9:28b-36.."Jesus went up to the mountain to pray. While He was praying his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white." How often do I feel like this upward motion in being on the mountain as I gaze at the tabernacle or the monstrance or the grouping I shared with you that I see as I sit on the couch to say my rosary and prayers.... Rising in prayer..."rising to the heart of God". Yes, also when Pat, I and John say morning prayer around the breakfast table we are feeling our hearts take flight up to the heights... above the hard and scarey situations that we encounter or the day to day dullness that we face in the recovery and returning to the "real world".
Fr Simon Tugwell... a Dominican priest and author... says it better than I can:
"If we have real hearts, hearts purified of all that is not heart, they would gravitate towards God as naturally as ham to eggs.... It is a measure of our humanity that we should come to be facinated by God, and then all our life will fall into place, all our faculties will function in the way God intended them to function, we can then also put up with an awful lot of tiresome things in life, because they pale into insignificance beside the wonder of God. In that light, even pain and failure and betrayal cease to matter too much. Even they can be seen to shine, when they are seen in God, because even they have been accepted by God as the price of union with our world."
The sacraments are so powerful to me this lent.... I was really touched by the Eucharistic prayer that Father has been using this last week at Daily mass... I looked it up and brought a song book/mass book home so that I could read the words over and over and marvel at their beauty and deep meaning...Eucharistic prayer for mass of Reconcilliation I.... " When we were lost and could not find our way to you, you loved us more than ever: Jesus, your Son, innocent and without sin, gave himself into our hands and was nailed to a cross. Yet before he stretched out his arms between heaven and earth in the everlasting sign of your covenant, He desired to celebrate the Paschal feast in the company of His disciples...."
Jesus, Our hearts and souls rise to you out of the smallness of our lives.... You certainly embraced a "small and humble" life for 30 years on this earth. Yet, we know that you would go to that "mountain top of prayer" and become dazzling in the presence of your loving and forgiving Father! We find joy and hope and trust in our times of prayer even if it is in the car as we travel from here to there... It is all so wonderful and makes us realize that out of the humble places of our hearts we come to You... Jesus we trust in You. Amen
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