Making Our "Mountaintop" Experiences Meaningful

 

Dear Friends,

                Do you know what K-2 is? It’s the second tallest mountain in the world after Mt. Everest. Everest has been scaled numerous times over the last century, but K-2, had never been crested until January of this year, when ten Nepali, from Sherpa families, banded together to make the attempt. Despite frostbite and dramatic winds, the ten men linked arms and together ascended the pinnacle singing the National Anthem of Nepal. They were heroes whose lives would never be the same. They had been to the mountain, and the mountain had not conquered them !

                History is full of stories about people who look to the mountain as a place to find meaning and challenge.

                “I have been to the mountain!” Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed. The biblical people also partook of faith experiences that happened on Mt. Sinai, where God gave the tablets of the Law to Moses, the Mount where Jesus gave the Beatitudes to his listeners and today, the Mount of the Transfiguration, that stopping off place on the way to the passion where Jesus’ radiance, His oneness with His Father flowed over Peter, James and John, rendering them awestruck.

                Mountaintop experiences such as those of MLK Jr. and Jesus allowed them to go forward to their own passions intertwined with the resurrection to come.

                You and I have been to the mountain. By that I mean we have had symbolic moments which have changed us forever, but which we might not be able to name and can’t cling to tenaciously.

                 We can only get to the mountain by walking up. No chair lifts. As with  Jesus, others have come to the mountain with us – people with whom we have shared the power of the moment, but whose experiences were so different from ours. We can get to the top only in the company of others. Never alone. Today’s Gospel shows us that mountaintop experiences may be exhilarating, but they are not destinations. Like Jesus and his disciples, we must descend from the mountain to pick up the work at hand, namely grappling with the demons that threaten to destroy the fragile children we have borne, bodily or otherwise.

                  The antithesis of transfiguration is disfiguration in body, mind  and spirit. World players, imbued with evil, do not care if their actions disfigure people, but most of us care. Nonetheless, we disfigure people by our words or lack of them, by our actions or lack of them, by our blindness to the participation of others in the radiance of Christ.

                  I hope that, as we look on the faces of the people who come our way this Lent - indeed all year long - that we really see the transfiguration God makes real in them, and help those in need in supportive ways even as Jesus did when He came down from the mountain.

~Sister Joan Sobala