Have you ever had an experience in your life that was so wonderful, you didn’t want it to ever end?  Often, they are very short-lived experiences – a beautiful sunset, the feeling of connection with a friend, the ecstasy of falling in love, an exceptionally fine glass of wine, a beautiful dream from which you wake up, an inflow of strength in the midst of a trial, a quiet moment after communion, or during a walk in the sunshine, where you feel a sense of inner peace: at one with God, with yourself, with the universe. 

Then, as suddenly as the experience comes … it goes.  No matter how hard you try, you cannot cling to it, cannot possess it.  It evaporates, slips away out of our grasp.  Before you know it – it’s gone.

These moments in our lives are TRANSFIGURATIONS.  They lift us out of the cynicism and busyness of our everyday lives.  They give us a glimpse of God's glory in the heart of our experience.  In our over-full, too-busy lives, these moments often seem few and far between.  We get so busy, so preoccupied by our concerns and projects, that we fail to see them.  Sometimes, we give up looking for them, stop believing that they are possible.  And we lose that last and most precious of the gifts of the Holy Spirit: our sense of wonder and awe, our very ability to see the glory of God in the middle of the hustle and bustle of our busy lives.

There's another trap we can fall into: that of pursuing those moments, trying to cling to them, using them as a form of escape.  Sort of like Peter in today's Gospel.  Peter wants to build tents: settle in for the night.  He liked what he was seeing and feeling: he wanted to prolong the experience, to control it, to make it last as long as possible.  I can understand that. 

It's the feeling I sometimes have at the end of a really good film, or when I listen to a piece of music that stirs my soul, or when I sail to the bottom of a gentle slope while cross-country skiing in the woods.  Then I pray my own version of “Lord, it is good to be here”: Here!  Now!  Yes!

It's also the feeling you get at the end of a holiday when we know it's back to work (or school) on Monday.  Having just returned from a winter holiday in sunny Barbados two weeks ago, it’s a feeling I’m well acquainted with right now!  But once we begin to cling to an experience, once we think that we have some inherent right to have it, to own it, to control it, we cease seeing it for what it really is: a gift from God.  It's like chasing after a butterfly, or catching a soap bubble, or tracking a deer in the woods – you capture the butterfly, and crush it; you touch the bubble, it bursts; you come one step too close, and the deer disappears.

When we think of the Transfiguration as depicted in today’s Gospel, we tend to see it visually, as in Raphael’s famous painting of this scene in the Vatican Museums: Jesus floating in the sky, clothed in dazzling white; Moses on the right, holding the Tablets of the Law; Elijah on the left; the three awestruck disciples cowering on the mountaintop.  We see the glory.  But do we hear what they are talking about: Jesus' "departure", his upcoming suffering and death in Jerusalem?  Do we feel the struggle within them to stay awake, to make sense of what is going on?  This is the flip side of the Transfiguration: union with Christ in his glory also means union with Christ in his suffering.  A piece of news that Jesus' disciples – Peter in particular – had great difficulty accepting.

In her essay “Ministry to a Wounded World”, Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister speaks of the significance of Jesus’ transfiguration.  She remarks that Jesus’ chose not to identify himself with David the King or Aaron the Priest, but with Moses the Liberator and Elijah the Prophet. She concludes that our Christian vocation is not just about keeping structures running smoothly and providing comforting rituals, but about setting people free from what binds them, prophetically challenging the root causes of the injustices that still plague so many peoples and nations.  She writes:

Of course, the call to Christian ministry presupposes a long journey up the mountain to find God.  But it also means that we cannot build a spiritual life and expect to stay on top of our pious and antiseptic little mountains. 

The call of the spiritual life, the call of ministry, is the call to take all the insights into Christ and his life that we have gained on our private little mountains to the grasping, groaning world of our own time, with a deeper awareness of the root causes of its suffering, its demons.

What does it mean to minister today – on a new mountaintop, a new millennium, a new moment in history?  It means awareness, authenticity, and transfiguration.  It means being willing to be transformed, so that the world may be transformed into the image of Jesus, the Liberator.

Now don’t you agree that this sounds much more like Pope Francis’ version of Christianity than Donald Trump’s?!

I have often wondered "why" Jesus chose to bring Peter, James and John with him to the mountain that day.  Maybe he sensed that it would be easier for his friends to understand and accept his destiny, his choice to be faithful to his Father even unto death, if they had a sense of the glory of the Resurrection to come.  On the mountain, the disciples caught a glimpse of the glory, even though they weren't ready yet to hear about the Cross.  But I guess Jesus knew that somehow this event, this experience would register.  That even if they couldn't see it then, eventually they would understand that his glory and his Cross were not opposed, mutually exclusive, but just two different expressions of his total love for us, two successive steps in his promised victory over sin and death.

As a foretaste of his death and Resurrection, Jesus' Transfiguration is a call to us to allow our own lives to be enlightened and transformed: infused with a new hope, illumined by new light.  And isn’t this what Lent is really all about?  Lent is a season of transformation: a time where we make room for the Lord in our hearts and our lives, so that he can change them from within.  It is a time where we are empowered to accept the totality of our lives – its crosses as well as its joys – because we know that the Cross is never the final word, that the Resurrection is a promise we can count on.

Lent is also a season for prayer. It is while he is praying that Jesus is transfigured. Throughout the Gospels – and especially in the Gospel of Luke, our focus this year – whenever Jesus has an important decision to make, a special message to share with his disciples, a sign of great significance to perform, he prays first. 

He goes off - to a lonely place, a mountaintop - to be silent, to discern, to reconnect with his Father and thus know his will.  Are we not called to do the same - to find in the midst of our busy days even a few precious minutes, where we awaken to the presence of the God who dwells within us?

Prayer is neither an aesthetic against the painful realities of life, nor a way of escaping from difficulties and challenges which lie before us.  We don't pray for the "high" it gives us; we pray to be in intimate relationship with the Creator, we pray that we might be renewed, strengthened for whatever mission in life God has entrusted to us.  We pray not in order to change God.  We pray in order to give God a chance to change us.  And we need to be changed, because when we come down from the mountain, we inevitably meet someone in need: of healing, of friendship, of justice, of love.  Someone who needs a share of the gift we have just received.

In his famous "I have a dream" speech, Martin Luther King proclaimed, "I've been to the mountaintop ... and I've seen the glory."  But for Dr. King, the mountain was not a nice, safe refuge from the pain and strife of a messy, often unjust world; the dream was not a fantasy world into which he escaped, but a profound belief that the universal brotherhood for which he had prayed and worked for so long would one day be a reality - in God's time, if not his own.  He knew that the path to glory led through the Cross.  He also knew that at the bottom of the mountain, we confront

We too must dream the dream; during this time of Lent, we too are called to go to the mountaintop with the Lord, to embrace the totality of our lives, including our suffering; to see his glory.   Let us remember that NOTHING – no suffering, no trial, no hardship, no sin, no frailty, no weakness – can ever separate us from the love of Christ.  As we continue our Lenten pilgrimage, let us climb the mountain with Jesus, so that transfigured, enlightened, and transformed, we can become agents of transformation and enlightenment to our sisters and brothers in need.  Amen.