By: Tom and April Hoopes, Register Correspondents
Just as Lent is getting off the ground,
last Sunday’s Gospel gives us the story of the Transfiguration. While we
commemorate the 40 days of Jesus fasting in the desert with nothing but wild
beasts as his companions, we are presented with an image of Jesus transformed
in a glorious way on the mountaintop with the great prophets Elijah and Moses
as his companions.
It is a timely reminder of what the
sacrifice of Lent is leading toward: a total transformation in Christ.
This gospel reminds the two of us of a
monastery we frequently visited in college. It was a Ukrainian Catholic
monastery devoted to the Transfiguration. When we made the trip, it was
typically Lent. The monks would share their simple, sparse meal with us, and we
would pray with them and attend Divine Liturgy.
The monks’ whole life was a kind of Lent, and they had clearly been
transformed by it. They had the gentle attractiveness and power of presence
about them that only comes from God — a mini-transfiguration.
In
Lent, we are all supposed to be like that.
In
the first reading, Abraham is clearly a man transfigured by God. Each time he
hears the call of God, he says, “Here I am!” … a man of prayer, with a heart
open to God. God…asks him to sacrifice his son, and
Abraham’s generosity doesn’t hold back.
The practice of Lent can make us just like
that: Praying more makes our hearts more open to God. Fasting in Lent makes our
wills more docile to God. And sacrificing during Lent helps put the created
order in perspective, allowing us to be more generous to God.
As St. Paul puts it in the second reading:
“If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but handed
him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with
him?”
When Abraham takes his beloved son up the
mountain, the son who represented his future and his self-worth, he is putting
everything on the line. And he is willing to give all of that to God. The only
place to gain the strength to do it is from God h himself — who spared Abraham’s
son and promised to bless him.
This Lent is the time to do just that.
Tom and April Hoopes write for the
Catholic Register from Atchison, Kansas, where Tom is writer in residence at
Benedictine College.
Pax et bonum
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