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
