“This is my beloved Son
with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.”
On my summer vacation, I love to climb the 14ers in Colorado.
The 14ers are 14,000 foot high mountains.
They are awesome to climb but takes a lot of work
because you have to climb during the daytime.
It takes more than 12 hours of hiking;
7 hours up and 5 hours down.
You have to get off the mountain peak before Noon
because the afternoon storms come in
and well, let’s say, you don’t want to be
on the top of that mountain when the lightning strikes!
I always think of those mountains
when I hear today’s reading of the Transfiguration
because it is such a powerful mountain-top experience.
I always find those climbs a sacred experience.
I would like to make a metaphor, a parallel,
between what happens on the mountain climb of the 14er
and what happens on the mountain of the Transfiguration
for the disciples and hopefully for us.
There are three components to climbing a 14er
and they are not necessarily obvious.
First is the mountain climb, the ascent,
and the hard work of climbing that mountain is self-evident.
When you pass about 11,000 feet, the air gets really thin
and once you get past 12,000, it gets so thin
you can only take about 40 paces before you are completely out of breath and you cannot move easily taking only a few steps at a time.
So the arduous work of climbing the mountain is stage one.
The second part is when you are on the top of the mountain,
there are breathtaking views;
there is nothing above you anymore.
Everything is below you.
You feel like you are the king of the mountain;
and you have just climbed it.
Most often, you are the only one up there
because no one else is as crazy as you to do that.
It is just spectacular and breathtaking after all that work.
Taking in the grace of that moment is the second part.
It is a transformative experience.
The third part is the least obvious and it is the descent.
Actually, it takes as much effort to go down as it does to go up.
And sometimes harder on the joints and the knees
and it is where the most accidents happen
because of tiredness and weakness.
When you are at the peak,
you always have to remember you are only half-way there.
The climb down is equally important.
Now here is the parallel I’m trying to make:
In that climb, the ascent is the hard work of prayer in our lives.
Now, it might be self-evident
but it actually gets harder the deeper you go in your prayer life.
The ordinary prayer life of saying our prayers
is the lower part of the mountain
but the really rarified air at the top of a 14er
is the rarified air of a deeper silent prayer
where we just learn to listen to God.
In that silent place, it is hard work
because we’ve got to put aside all the worries
and all the activities of the day
and we have to reappropriate our priorities
to make silent prayer our priority.
And that takes hard work.
We just need to acknowledge that is work but it is worth it.
The second part of experience is God speaking to us
in the silence of our hearts and it is transformative.
It something powerful and breathtaking.
When we are in silence and we are with the Lord
and the Lord says something to us,
and we hear his voice in our hearts
we want to say like the disciples say, “I want to stay here.”
It is a truly transformative experience,
a transfiguration moment for us.
But you see, we can’t stay because we are only half-way there.
We still have to put into practice what we have heard in silence.
The third part is bringing what we have heard in silence
and putting it into practice as directed by the Lord.
This is the hard work of the descent.
This is the hardest part of all and the most underrated part of prayer.
It is equally as hard as the ascent
because we now have to put into action
what the Lord has asked of us
and it is where the most injuries happen in our spiritual lives.
Bu what is this mountain-top experience? How do we have it?
We can have these happy moments in prayer,
which can be profound in so many ways:
they can be truly mountain-top experiences of beauty and love.
But most often the hard work of prayer of silence
is when we are taking the small traumas of our day
and we are bringing them into prayer for healing.
If we allow them, these moments are transformative too.
They are transfiguration moments.
That is what makes the hard work of prayer worth it.
I’m not talking about major traumas of life
although we can take that to the mountain top too.
But the smaller traumas like when somebody says something unkind;
or says or does something really mean and we are ticked off;
and they are done by people we love so much.
It is confusing to be hurt by someone we love.
When we bring that to our prayer
and the Lord brings healing into that moment
within the quiet of our hearts and says,
“Yes” and then explains how the other person is wounded themselves
and then calls us to forgive them.
In that moment, there is a peace.
And there is a beauty in that moment.
This is where the transfiguration takes place for us
but we need to allow that transformation to occur.
Originally the translation for transfiguration was metamorphosis
and it a lot of ways that a better word
because it speaks more of the complete transformation.
We are called to be metamorphosize!
That is the hard part:
We have to listen to what Christ has asked us to do
and then allow him to do it within us
when we leave the mountain of our prayer.
Half-way there and we need to metamorphosize.
In today’s reading, the second part of this gospel,
is super important and most often glossed over.
When the disciples experience this beautiful moment,
they became afraid and fall to the ground.
And Jesus goes over and touches them and says,
“Rise. Do not be afraid.”
You see, Jesus says that to every single one of us;
he calls us to rise and to not be afraid;
to implement and to do what he has asked us to do.
That is what we are called to do, to listen to him
and allow the metamorphosis to take place within our hearts.
That is the same experience we have when we come to the liturgy.
There is the hard work of coming;
you with families know what it is like;
getting your kids out this morning and how cooperative they were.
Let’s say you know that it was hard work to get here. Right?
And some of us didn’t want to come.
I get that. But you are here.
You have made the ascent.
Now we are going to have this wonderful a mountain-top experience.
But understand we are only half-way there.
And, if we do not take what we have celebrated here
and bring it into action in our life then it really hasn’t happened.
We are only half-way when we actually finish the liturgy
because what we are to do outside of here.
We are called to bring our experience from here,
listening to him, doing and not being afraid to do
what the Lord has asked us to do in our lives.
Whether that be inside our own hearts,
allowing healing, allowing the Lord to heal us;
or whether it’s that we come
and give words of healing to somebody else;
we are called to bring what we have celebrated here into action,
to become what we have received, right here, this morning.
We become metamorphosize, transfigured.
My friends, as we come to the Eucharist,
this high point of our moment together,
in our mountain-top experience,
we must cooperate with the Lord and his grace.
May we allow the Lord to transform us, to metamorphosize us
into an even deeper disciple than before.
May we make sure that we come, and we listen to him;
and then rise and are not afraid to become his disciple.
“This is my beloved Son
with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.”
