Mountain Retreat
I recently spent a weekend in the mountains near Clarks Summit, Pa., with nearly 80 Catholic college students and their campus ministers, celebrating Mass for them, offering times of Adoration, and hearing Confessions. Lots of Confessions.
Having the opportunity to come away and separate oneself from the anxieties and busyness of life often allows one’s heart to be broken-open by grace in ways that we normally don’t allow it to experience. It’s often easier to be driven to distraction and then numb ourselves in countless ways instead of facing head-on what God is trying to reveal to us.
This past weekend, the college students stopped running from themselves. Instead, they climbed the mountain to a place where God could speak. And in so doing, their lives were transfigured.
Both our first reading and Gospel this weekend speak of the prompting-providence of God, leading his chosen disciples to places where our faith and Godly-mystery merge in order to strengthen and transform, heal and set free to love authentically.
For Abraham, he was asked by the Lord to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, the one that would make Abraham a father of many nations. How could that be if the son’s life was allowed to be extinguished by his very dad? (As my high school Lit teacher would always say: “Look at the foreshadowing, gentlemen!”)
Even Jesus, as he was preparing to become the Eternal Sacrifice for every nation and people that Isaac could never be, took his closest disciples to a mountaintop, where God could reveal his glory and power to them. They needed to see and cling to the Transfiguration moment, for shortly thereafter, they would face another mountain that didn’t make any sense: the Mount of Calvary.
One mountain moment helped them face another that was to come. And herein lies the entire reason for the Transfiguration: allowing the glory of God to prepare us for the greater glory of the Cross, and seeing our own Calvary moments as the road back to transformation and eternal life.
Everything that happened on those respective mountaintops for Abraham and Isaac, as well as for Jesus and his three disciples, was meant to reveal God’s power, especially when it comes in ways that we least expect.
One student who sat across from me this past weekend, after having spent time in prayer and immersed in the Word, came with a heavy heart that needed transfiguration: “I’ve been so angry, so worried, so distracted,” he shared. “I’ve given into every temptation trying to find selfish happiness. Nothing works. Nothing.” At this point, a sob came from the depths of his young spirit, and he cried out: “Father, I hate who I am.”
He climbed one challenging mountain in that moment, and there – in that blinding flash of light – was revealed clearly what needed to be sacrificed to the Father: the self-loathing, the despair, the hatred. Grace broke-in to a wounded heart, and the glory of God shone all around this young man. He was set-free. Transfigured, one might say, because he wasn’t afraid to take the trek through Calvary to resurrection.
It’s what the Father wants for each one of us on our journeys, and so this second Sunday of Lent is meant to challenge us: How will you allow the grace of transfiguration to reach your brokenness? How will you allow the glory of the Father to call you into deeper relationship with Him, others and even yourself?
Peter, understandably, wanted to stay in that mountain place of security and glory (who wouldn’t?), but what he really needed to see – and Christ knew it -- was the glory of God that reveals itself in self-sacrifice; the glory that comes when we aren’t afraid to allow the cross to shape our hearts in authentic, loving ways.
Peter couldn’t stay at the Transfiguration mountain until he himself was changed by the Love of Christ poured out on Calvary. With no Cross, there is no true glory.
That’s hard for our hearts to grasp, because really – who wants to carry a cross? Who wants to allow suffering and pain to change us for the better, to make us light for others? Who wants Calvary to turn us into vessels of resurrected, transfigured love for the world?
It really might be fair to say, then, that when one allows his or her life to be touched by the glory of God at work in the Sacraments – especially Reconciliation and Eucharist – then one is willing to go to Calvary, where having learned to really love through that path, one can return to a new glory and share it with others.
Go up to be touched by glory in the sacramental presence of God. Then, boldly go to be transformed by the Cross you and I are invited to embrace, however it may come into our lives. Allow the Calvary love learned through the Cross to shape how you walk into the future, always for others.
The Cross is the Way God uses to make us love like Him, if we allow it to.
As the retreat weekend in Clarks Summit began to wind down – as these 20-somethings began to get ready to return down the mountain to the temptations and anxieties that awaited them at Delaware and Drexel, West Chester and Loretto, Pa., I watched the young man who climbed the mountain on Saturday and allowed grace to break-open his heart. He faced the lies that Satan threw at him, he picked up his cross willingly and found healing and strength in the sacraments that Christ made His love known.
And here’s the real glory of it all: you could see this young man actually transfigured. He radiated peace. He walked with other students who still struggled to climb to the place where he himself went. He was loving radically in a way that led him from selfishness to self-sacrifice, putting others first. And he learned to die-to-self in the way Peter, James and John also learned when they climbed both Transfiguration and Calvary.
Isn’t that the goal of this mountainous journey we all must climb?
The question now: are you willing? Am I? It’s never once and done – it’s an everyday climb.
Allow the glory of God’s Love revealed in His Son, present among us in Word and Sacrament, bring you to the Calvary places where the Cross shapes your heart to love authentically, freely and without strings or expectations attached. It really is good for us to be there.
The climb and the Cross – the only way to be transfigured by the Love and Mercy of Jesus Christ.