Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Lent is a training for heaven someone said this week, a training for eternal life. It’s a different way of thinking of it. To be detached from this world, which is passing and to cling to Christ and the saints which cannot be taken away from us.
The mountain is a special place where God encounters man. It happens often in the Bible as we heard today when Abraham took his son to Moriah to offer him up to God. And God encounters others on a mountain: Moses, Elijah, when he hears God in the whisper, and with his Son on Golgotha. So why is it that we don’t want to go up to the mountain? We know there are difficulties up there, uncertainties, problems, what we call the cross. Yet that is where we can be transfigured. Don’t flee from it, enter the sufferings God allows for you, not as a punishment but as a help for your holiness, and Christ will be there, and you will be transformed. I am positive that one day we can say like Peter, Lord, how good it is to be here! Enter into it and don’t run away.
Moses and Elijah were conversing with Jesus. What were they saying? It could be that they were speaking of the marvels of God, what he had done for them, how being witnesses helped them to love God even more. If I fall in love with myself, I cannot love God. I need to deny that self-love so that I can love God. I will love him more when I see and experience how much he has loved me. When we profess our faith, when we are a witness to our family or friend by what we do or say, it helps us to see how much God has done for me. It is a great help to write down the things that God has done for you in your lifetime. This will help you to see the wonders he has done: the person you married, the job that you have, the sickness or difficulty that didn’t destroy you, but made you more patient, etc. It is so easy to forget them or to think they came from us.
How much glory we see with two saints in the gospel today. Imagine how heaven will be when it is loaded with saints, perhaps billions. What kind of glory must be present there? We saw a glimpse of it on the feast of St. Polycarp who when he was burned at the stake the eye witnesses smelled a beautiful fragrance and saw a golden loaf of bread in the fire. He had been transfigured, totally, and God was saying to us, I will feed you with this bread, with this courage. I will transform you! We have this opportunity to be transfigured at every Eucharist, especially when we receive the Lord, and beg his help and his peace.