Fourth Sunday of Easter, cycle B

John 10:11-18

I spent part of my medical training at Roswell Park Institute in Buffalo, one of the oldest cancer centers in the country.  I had a very close friend, a couple of years older than me, who had finished his training and stayed on as a member of the faculty.  We would get into some great discussions over a beer now and then.  I still touch base with him every year during the Christmas season.  

My friend was and is an agnostic.  Not an atheist, not a believer; he simply doesn’t care.  For him, even in his old age, this is the only life you can be sure of, so live it as best you can.  That’s not bad advice for anyone.  But here’s the thing.  Jesus said that he is the way, the truth and the life and no one can come to the father except through him.  Saint Peter said, “there is no other name by which we are saved.”  And for two thousand years people have given up their lives in the attempt to bring the good news to the world.  My friend, by the way, married a nice Irish Catholic girl with two aunts who were nuns, and he spent many years accompanying her and their children to church.  Even after she passed away, he continued to send in the contribution to the collection plate.  

So what do we do with my friend?  Can I hope that Jesus will raise him up on the last day?  My friend doesn’t believe, and I doubt he ever will; and Jesus seems to have made belief in him the condition for salvation; certainly, that’s what Paul taught.  I suspect we all have dear ones who are like my friend.

Today’s gospel has Jesus calling himself the Good Shepherd.  The way much of John’s gospel is arranged, Jesus works a sign; people ask him what that is all about; then he tells them.  The sign he worked before the good shepherd explanation was that of the man blind from birth.  You probably remember -- the Pharisees kept trying to get him to deny that Jesus had cured him, but he stuck to his guns and got thrown out of the synagogue.  That’s when Jesus finds him and asks if he believes in the Son of Man? The man says, “Who is that?” and Jesus replies “You’re looking at him”.  As you can tell, If I had written John’s gospel it would have been much shorter.  

But the point is that Jesus calls the blind man into his flock, but the last step is an act of faith, not faith in some abstract concept, not even becoming a member of the church, which didn’t really exist when this event was to have taken place.  And Jesus goes on to talk about other sheep that do not belong to this fold; these also must I lead, and they will hear my voice”.  

A lot of the time we are accustomed to thinking that you have to be a member of the church to be in Christ’s flock.  Vatican II allowed the possibility that non-Catholic Christians who are baptized are in some sense part of the church.  John Paul II emphasized that God’s covenant with the Jewish people wasn’t just snatched away.  The theologian Karl Rahner invented the idea of “anonymous Christians” -- people who didn’t know Christ through no fault of their own, but tried to live as best they could given what they did know.  And finally the theologian von Balthazar wrote a book entitled “Dare we hope that all will be saved?” to which his answer was yes -- so you don’t have to read the book now.  And I think we all hope this, but yet if everyone can be saved, what is the Church for?

One great answer is that the Church is not there to save people, primarily.  It is there to show that the salvation Jesus offers is already present, already at work in the world.  We can only be saved because of Jesus’ sacrifice, true, and when you look at the church, warts and all, you see the evidence of that.  And at the bottom of our souls is a hope for some unconstricted good that meets the hunger we all have in our beings.  In our minds we desire truth, we are hungry for that as well.  And we all long to leave our loneliness and know each other as we know ourselves.  And Christ is the answer to all these longings.  And for those who have not yet met Christ, their task is to be faithful to that hunger for good, for truth, for unity, which only Jesus can satisfy.

My friend has faults, but nothing you wouldn’t find in many of our fellow parishioners.  But he values truth, he seeks the good, he loves his fellow human beings, especially his family.  And I pray for him every day that on this side or the other side of the grave, he will meet the only one who is the good shepherd, who is seeking those not of his flock.

Third Sunday of Easter, cycle B

Luke 24:35-48

When I was growing up I seem to remember frequent get-together’s with the families of my cousins -- and I had a lot of them.  Or maybe we’d go over to the grandparents’ house for supper, or vice versa.  My mother and father liked to entertain, about the only thing they agreed upon.  My mother had nine siblings, and four were farmers or married to farmers.   I remember when I was a newly minted doctor and went back to Montana. I had some time so I drove to the farm country to join several relatives for supper. Interesting topics come up at mealtime.  The men got into an argument about which was better as a fertilizer, chicken manure or cow manure?  After a great deal of debate, my cousin turned to me and asked me what I thought, because I was a doctor.  I don’t remember my answer.

Today Jesus appears in the midst of his disciples once again; and they are startled and terrified once again.  Jesus has been murdered.  His heart has been impaled on a spear just to make sure he was dead.  He was buried in the ground, wrapped in a shroud.  And he rises from the dead.  The world will never be the same.  The most momentous event in history, past, present, and future, has taken place.  God was put to death and man rose from the dead, and God and man were one in this Jesus.  And Jesus asks, “do you have anything to eat?”  

What kind of question is that, Jesus?  I imagine that dying and rising from the dead can make you pretty hungry – but still....

It's possible to read this statement as a way for Jesus to show his disciples that he is flesh and bone, not a ghost.  But remember that in the section of the gospel just before this one, he was sitting at the table sharing a meal with the two disciples who had just told the apostles about their own meeting with Jesus.  

I think instead that Jesus wanted to eat with his disciples again; the desire to share food with friends is perhaps a much stronger sign of being human than having a body of flesh and bone.  

But eating with other people is an intimate act, and not an exclusive one.  Most of us who are married began our relationship with meals together – usually these would begin with sharing food and drink at a party or a dance, gradually progressing to that first deliberate meal together in a nice restaurant.  And getting away to eat together is still a way we renew our relationship.  

The Quakers have an insight which I think all of us can appreciate; unlike most Christian denominations, they do not celebrate the lord's supper, the Eucharist, holy communion – all terms which have to do with a symbolic meal of bread and wine, which we Catholics believe becomes the body and blood of Christ.  The Quakers, though, believe that wherever two or more people share a meal, it is a sacred meal.  God is present in a special way.  We can see the roots of the idea in the statement Jesus made, “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am.”  

When Jesus appeared among his disciples, they were frightened and even terrified.  When he asked them for something to eat, they were reassured because they had heard words like that from him so many times before when they walked with him through the length and breadth of Israel.  No doubt they remembered the little girl whom Jesus had raised from the dead.  As he handed her to her parents, his words to them were “you give her something to eat.”  After he raises his friend Lazarus from the dead, the next scene has Jesus at a supper being held in the home of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus.  On the shore of the lake after his resurrection he starts a charcoal fire and cooks some fish, and calls his apostles: “come, have breakfast. “ 

In our world we are losing something that makes us human.     In many homes everyone eats when their schedule permits.  And when there is an attempt to get everybody to sit down together, there is often someone who feels put out because they will be late for the next event.  

When we eat with each other, we make ourselves vulnerable; we open ourselves up in more ways than opening our mouths.  We can't really eat with other people unless we converse, even if we talk about nothing but the weather.  If we don't speak, we are eating alongside them, not with them.  

It's important, I think, for us to make an effort to recapture the act of eating together, at least now and then.  It's important for our humanity, it's important to overcome alienation and loneliness.  And it's important for our appreciation of the Eucharist, which, after all, is a meal, a meal in common, a meal in which we share the bread and wine and speak with each other and with our father, all in response to the invitation of Jesus: “take and eat this, all of you, for this is my body.”

So you've just heard a sermon about sharing a meal.  Maybe you feel it's a small matter.  But figure if Jesus asked for something to eat after changing history, opening the gates of heaven, overcoming death, and winning our salvation, it isn't a small matter at all.   

Second Sunday of Easter, cycle b

 Divine Mercy Sunday 2024

John 20:19-31

Some of you experienced the Tridium, the three days leading up to Easter Sunday. I woke up Sunday morning feeling like I had really accomplished something.  I’d been to the mountaintop!  I’d participated in each of these services, wore red on Thursday, purple on Friday, white on Saturday.  The washing of the feet, the honoring of the Cross, the confirmation of two members of our parish.  I felt very holy.  Of course not everybody can do the Tridium, especially families with small children.  Going to these services would have been too much.  For all of us though, Easter Sunday seems to mark a new beginning.  Christ has risen.  Now it’s a week later.  How are you and I different?  Do you see the world in new ways?  I must confess I don’t feel as though things have changed for me.  Except of course I don’t have to abstain anymore, so I’ll miss those lobster dinners we had every Friday.  

But I guess we aren’t alone.  The apostles have witnessed the empty tomb; they’ve personally spoken with the risen Jesus, and received reports from Mary Magdalene and the other women and the two disciples who met him on the road.  As you’ve just heard, Jesus sent them forth and gave them the power to forgive sins.  So here we are a week later, and the apostles are still inside that room.  And John will tell us about even later when some of these apostles have decided to go back to fishing.  It’s as though the resurrection didn’t make any difference in their lives.  

But of course we know that it did.  We wouldn’t be here in this church today if it hadn’t completely changed their lives, so much so that they died rather than deny the truth of the resurrection.

Christ’s resurrection is a big deal; the empty tomb is a life-changing event.  The resurrection should make a difference in our lives.  But it takes time.

Thomas will be known as “doubting Thomas” for the rest of human history.  And even after he fell on his knees and declared his faith -- he’s the first one of the apostles to recognize that Jesus is not just the Messiah, but God - John tells us Thomas is out there fishing with Peter and the others on that lake in Galilee.  It’s as though this event, this moment when he recognized the divine in Jesus, didn’t make much of a difference.  But we all know it did. Thomas brought Christianity to India, and when Portuguese missionaries visited India in the fifteenth century, they found a thriving Christian community which claimed Thomas as its founder.  The liturgical language was Syriac, which is very similar to Aramaic, the language Jesus and Thomas spoke.  Thomas, like all but one of the apostles, died a martyr’s death.

Resurrection makes a difference in our lives; but it takes time.  It’s not so much an event as a process.  Through cooperation with God’s grace, we become resurrected people.  

The empty tomb is a fact, Resurrection is a story.  Facts are like snapshots; stories are more like movies.  Facts are starting points for stories.  Whatever the facts of my life, of your life, today, that’s the starting point for our resurrection story.  Wherever you are now, that’s the room that Jesus enters into your life.  Maybe you are going through a health scare, or the loss of a loved one, or difficulty with a family member.  Maybe you are being blessed by good fortune.  Where you are today is your locked room.  The great tragedy for the apostles is not that they haven’t done anything.  The tragedy would have been if they had remained in that locked room, if they had refused to get out of the house.

Jesus comes into our locked rooms, invites us to embark upon the great adventure of resurrection.  He will keep coming back, offering us peace, hope, courage; and when we accept those gifts, we can unlock the door, we can become resurrection people.

What doors are locked in your life?  Are there things that have kept you stuck in the same place? We made resolutions at the beginning of lent, and maybe didn’t keep them that well.  That’s ok.  Maybe we need to make resolutions at the beginning of the Easter season.  What can we do to become people of the resurrection?  

Easter, 2024

John 20:1-9

There were a lot of witnesses to Jesus’ crucifixion.  Long before the gospels were written, there was a consensus-- Jesus had been betrayed by Judas; arrested, encountered the Chief Priest and Pilate, tortured, nailed to the cross, died.  Peter had betrayed him; the other apostles deserted him.  Each gospel writer tells almost the same story, because people had been telling each other about the crucifixion all through the Roman empire, as disciples of Christ spread out with the message.  If someone had a different story, no one would have believed him.  

The resurrection stories, though, are another thing entirely.  All the gospels tell different stories.  You can’t come up with a consensus.  They are all, in a sense, personal.  No one saw Jesus rise.  But all the stories have a few things in common.  They begin with the totally unexpected discovery of an empty tomb.  Each writer tells it a little differently.  In Matthew, two women including Mary Magdalene go to the tomb and meet an angel who rolled back the stone that sealed the tomb.  He announces that Jesus has risen, and they are to go and tell the apostles.  On the way, the women meet Jesus himself.  In Mark, three women including Mary Magdalene, find the stone rolled back and meet a young man dressed in a white robe who tells them that Jesus has risen.  Later, Jesus appears to Mary, who tells those who had been with him, but they don’t believe it.  In Luke the women are Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, but they find the tomb open and two men with clothes gleaming like lightning, who ask, “Why are you looking for the living among the dead?” They tell the apostles, and Peter runs to the tomb and finds the strips of linen, and wonders what happened.  And finally, in John, we heard how Mary discovered the empty tomb, told the a;postles, and Peter and the one Jesus loved come to the tomb.  John’s gospel goes on to tell that beautiful story of Mary thinking that Jesus is the gardener and discovering it is Jesus when he simply calls her by name.  

After the discovery of the empty tomb, we read about Jesus appearing in the midst of his disciples who think he’s a ghost;  appearing again when Thomas is there; appearing to the disciples on the way to Emmaus; and appearing to some of the apostles on the shores of the lake.  In all these cases they don’t recognize him until he does something typical of Jesus -- calls them by name; explains the scriptures, asks for their faith; feeds them.  Everyone concludes that Jesus is alive, he has risen, not a ghost, but in his real body -- but obviously different, obviously so different that it takes a while to recognize him.  

Most bible experts believe that the four gospels were written for different audiences by writers who firmly believed that Jesus rose from the dead.  Like the crucifixion story, there were things you couldn’t leave out.  And the writers assembled their accounts around those things, using some of the many stories of Jesus’ appearances that happened after his crucifixion.  If you were making up a resurrection story, would you start with an empty tomb?  I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.  Would you have the first witness, or witnesses be women?  In those days women weren’t considered credible witnesses in a court of law.  Would you have believed the apostles, peasants from Galilee, who claimed they had seen him alive and well?  Thomas, one of his best friends, did not.  But as time went on more and more people were convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead.  And when you think about it, that’s amazing, that’s proof, that means that something supernatural is at work getting people to literally lay down their lives rather than deny that Jesus rose from the dead.  

It’s not hard to believe that Jesus was executed on a cross.  To believe he rose from the dead, though -- it takes faith, because he leaves us free to accept or reject him.  And I’ll make a bold statement -- I think Jesus continues to move among us, revealing himself in different ways.  Many years ago there was a group of monks who kind of lost their charism.  They formed factions, they stopped obeying to abbot; some took to drinking more than their share of the monastery beer.  The place was really falling apart.  The abbot didn’t know what to do.  Then a wandering rabbi appeared at the monastery door.  He was invited to dine with the monks.  During supper, he said, “I know you believe that the Messiah has already come into the world.  I came to tell you that one of you is the Messiah.”  And from that moment on, the monastery became known for its holiness, its discipline, and indeed its joy.  CS Lewis said, “next to the blessed sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses”.  Jesus has risen.  Jesus sits at the right hand of his Father.  Jesus lives in you and in me.  Let us look at each other with a new sense of wonder.  

Fifth Sunday in Lent, cycle

 John 12:20-33

In the pacific northwest several tribes of native Americans practiced the custom of potlatch. These tribes lived off the land and managed to set aside some of their goods for the future. They also had enough leisure time to make carvings, totem poles, blankets and beautifully decorated tools. Among the various tribal families, some members of course were richer than others. Somewhere in the distant past a unique form of government evolved. Families would gather together, and the leaders of the families would compete in how much they could give away. The winners of this contest were the leaders of larger clans, and so it went. They recognized that a person who could give away the most was entitled to the highest leadership position.

In contrast, i think, is our American culture. We accumulate. I visit elderly people and one thing that seems common is that they have a lot of stuff. The dining room, once undoubtedly the place where a family celebrated special occasions, is now a place to put things that have no other purpose except maybe sentimental value. And the more we have, the less free we are, the more we are tied down.

Jesus is giving us a lesson on how to have a happy life. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”. We know that this is true. All of us have experienced this. If you fall in love and commit your life to someone else, you have to let parts of your old life go. If you are a parent, you know that you have to make sacrifices so that your child can thrive. And if you have a career, you’ve sacrificed for it. We can’t grow unless we prune away things that hold us back.

We see this pattern in biblical stories. Abraham leaves his home and family to become a wandering herdsman, and God makes him the father of nations. Peter and Andrew leave their careers as fishermen to follow Jesus and become fishers of men.

The secret of life isn’t much of a secret. It’s a pattern of loss and renewal, of dying and rising, of letting go and getting back.

The Greeks at the beginning of today’s gospel want to see Jesus. And Jesus gives this strange response. John’s gospel always makes us think. Because i think we all want to see Jesus, not under the accidents of bread and wine, as we will see him today, but as he appeared on the mountaintop to his disciples. We hope someday to see him glorified.

But Jesus tells us the way this hope must be fulfilled. Whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where i am there also will my servant be.

If you’ve changed something about your life this lent, you may have an inkling of what Jesus is talking about. If I've given up something pleasurable and stuck with it, that’s a tiny bit of hating my life. If I've taken on a spiritual practice that I hadn’t done before, that’s a tiny bit of where I act out my love for Jesus. To the extent that my life is disrupted, I've made room for the holy spirit to act in me.

In the second half of the gospel Jesus points to the hour that has finally come, the hour of judgment, the hour when the great process of glorifying the father will begin. And Jesus talks about being lifted up. One writer talked about a threefold lifting up. First is his crucifixion; he is lifted up to the scorn of the world and dies his sacrificial death. The second is his resurrection, when he comes bringing with him the souls of those who have been waiting for him; souls like Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah -- prophets, priests and kings, as well as ordinary souls of the pre-Christian era. The final lifting up is the ascension, when Jesus goes to sit at the right hand of the father, to advocate for us until his kingdom comes and he returns to judge the living and the dead.

So we should ask ourselves today, what is there about my life that I should give up? What is holding me back from being a saint? And what can I do to allow Jesus to draw me to himself when he is lifted up?

Fourth Sunday in Lent, cycle B

 Fourth Sunday in Lent, cycle B

John 3:14-21

One of the things that people of other faiths have a hard time understanding is why we Christians claim that Jesus died for our sins.  And some of the explanations given by Christians don’t help.  In the early days of the church, there were three such explanations. 

The first reason is that because of our sins, we deserve death and hell, and thus belong to Satan.  Jesus offers himself in exchange for us, then having paid the debt, the Father raises him from the dead.  

A second reason is that Jesus gave us a way to become one with him, then allowed himself to be put to death and rose again because he is God, and we go along with him to the extent that we have “put on Christ” as Saint Paul puts it.  

 A third and probably the most popular, was that God demanded satisfaction for the offense of the sinfulness of humanity, and human beings were never going to be able to come up with a sacrifice great enough.  So Jesus, being God and man, offered himself to atone for our sins, to satisfy the anger of the Father.  This view has been commonplace down through the ages, and certainly dovetails with some of the pictures of God in the Old Testament.  During the Exodus, Moses is always trying to get God to calm down and not smite his people.  And the God portrayed in parts of the Old Testament does seem to respond to sacrifices involving the death of an animal, who stands in for the person desiring forgiveness.  Certainly many of our prayers reflect this theology, and every time we hear about Abraham’s almost sacrifice of his son Isaac, we see an obvious parallel with Jesus, whose sacrifice was not held back from happening by an angel.

Today’s gospel passage brings up this issue once again.  If God loves me would he demand my eternal damnation  because of my sin?  It doesn’t make sense.  And if he loves me, a sinner, does he not love Jesus who is perfect?  What human father would demand the death of his son?  Jesus answered that question by asking another question:  Which among you would give his son a stone when he asked for a loaf, or a scorpion when he asked for a fish?

But in the idea of atonement, we have a misunderstanding of sin.  Sin is not the breaking of a commandment.  Sin is the moving away from God, who is our origin and to whom we are supposed to return.  God does not punish us for sin; sin carries its own punishment.  Sin is never a victimless crime; the sinner is always the victim.  The punishment for stealing is maybe getting caught, but always driving a wedge between me and my victim; to steal from him means that I don’t recognize his humanity.  The punishment for carrying around a grudge is that everything I think about is now colored by my anger at someone.  And you can take everything that is a sin and see that sin always separates you from others, from God, and even from yourself in a sense, because sin always diminishes a person. 

But sin is a consequence of God’s greatest gift to us, free will.  He loves us completely, and made us to respond to him with our own love.  But you can’t love unless you are free.  

God makes us free, and even allows for the misuse of freedom.  Because in our state of freedom, we are the ones who have to find our way back to God.  In today’s gospel Jesus compares himself to light, the light of the world.  It’s like a campfire at night in the forest.  You can wander off and eventually lose sight of the fire and be unable to find your way back.  We are like that lost camper.  And God chooses to send His Son after us, who willingly goes all the way to take up the consequences of our sin, which is ultimately death.  The Son and the Father want the same thing, as does the Spirit; the three persons all will our salvation.  God is not an angry king who must be satisfied by his son’s death.  God is not handing his Son over to buy us from Satan in some kind of cosmic trade.  God is not even fooled by us putting on Christ so that when he looks at me he sees his son.  God, the Father, the Son and the Spirit gives us the freedom to choose Love, the love of God, of my neighbor, of myself -- and that is my destiny, that is my salvation.  If I wander into the darkness, I can only find my way back if someone comes for me.  And that’s why Jesus God and Man, lives my human life and dies my human death and then rises, bringing me with him.  

 

Second Sunday of Lent, cycle B

Mark 9:2-10

I WHISPERED, “GOD, SPEAK TO ME” AND A ROBIN SANG. BUT I DID NOT HEAR. I YELLED, “GOD, SPEAK TO ME!” AND THE THUNDER ROLLED ACROSS THE SKY. BUT I DID NOT LISTEN. I LOOKED AROUND AND SAID, “GOD, LET ME SEE YOU!” AND A STAR SHONE BRIGHTLY, BUT I DID NOT NOTICE. I SHOUTED, “GOD, SHOW ME A MIRACLE!” AND A BABY WAS BORN, BUT I DID NOT KNOW. SO I CRIED OUT IN DESPAIR, “TOUCH ME GOD, AND LET ME KNOW YOU ARE HERE.” WHEREUPON GOD REACHED DOWN AND TOUCHED ME, BUT I BRUSHED THE BUTTERFLY OFF MY SHOULDER AND WALKED AWAY. (Marylin Macdonald)

Today we hear the story of the transfiguration of the Lord as told by Mark. The three apostles who witness this are suddenly flooded with a revelation, something that was never apparent when they were walking around Palestine with Jesus. In a flash of insight, they are shown Jesus as he really is, God become man. They see that Moses and Elijah still live, still converse with God as friends speak to each other; the apostles realize that life goes on after death. And they hear the voice of God, and it will be the last time the Father communicates with people directly. And the voice tells them that henceforth they are to listen to Jesus, the beloved son.

The apostles had a mystical experience. I think that’s why we have three different descriptions in the three synoptic gospels. You can’t pin down a mystical experience, you can’t tell other people what went on, really. These experiences aren’t just in the brain. Peter puts it well. “Rabbi, it is good that we are here”. Mystical experiences are gifts in a sense. “Let us make three tents” he goes on to say. Mystical experiences are such that you want them to last, you don’t want to leave them. And “he hardly knew what to say, they were so terrified”. Mystical experiences are always a little frightening, because you go out of yourself, you feel out of control.

I think the little poem I read at the beginning tells us that God speaks to us all the time, and we just aren’t tuned in. We fail to recognize God’s voice because of the noise of this world and our distractions as we go about our daily lives. This is a problem with prayer, which is meant to be a two-way communication. Sure, it’s a good thing to pray the rosary, to pray during Mass, to pray from a prayer book. But what we don’t do is listen;. We don’t sit in silence and let God speak to us. When you read about the great saints, the emphasis is usually on their great deeds, or their martyrdom, or their missionary work. You don’t hear about their prayer life so much. Saint Theresa of Avila wrote extensively on her own interior life, partly so that others could follow her into deeper communion with God. In her book, “The Interior Castle”, she talks about how to reach that state in which we are able to hear God speak to us. I’m not there yet, but I try to be sensitive to all the ways He speaks to me. ON the other hand, I believe all of us have had some sort of mystical experience, or mountaintop event, when God seems to be taking us out of our ordinary lives for a few minutes and tries to get our attention.

Last summer Joan and I had the good fortune to take a cruise from Seattle to Alaska. That was a great vacation. But there was a moment there when we took an excursion out of Juneau to the Mindelheim glacier. IT’s a huge mass of ice sitting between two peaks and feeding into a lake below. They say it will be gone in 30 to 50 years if the climate keeps changing. But when I first saw it, I sensed I was in another world; I felt very insignificant in front of this natural phenomenon that has been there waxing and waning since long before the time of Christ. I didn’t want the moment to end, but it did.

Thomas Merton, the monk who wrote “Seven Story Mountain” had a mystical experience. He describes how he was walking in the shopping district of Louisville after he had come out of his hermitage. As he describes it, “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers...It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race...[I]if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

The transfiguration of Jesus means many things. But three stand out. God speaks to us if we only listen. If we could only see people as they really are, we couldn’t take our eyes off of their beauty and holiness. And if we could listen with the ears of our souls, we too would hear the words, “This is my beloved”. During this Lent make time to listen.