Reflecting on transfiguration

My lenten reading has been haphazard so far this season. Part of it is travel, part of it is timestress. But I think my real problem is a case of unbelief. Or at least of huge doubt? I’ve hit a kind of moment of “what is the point of all of this?” For that reason I’m all the more grateful for Michael Himes’ reflections, particularly this point:

In our tradition, of course, we recognize seven public communal sacraments. But all of us have our personal or familial sacraments which sometimes speak more powerfully to us than one or other of the seven public sacraments. For example, surely among the most fruitful and grace-filled sacraments for the vast majority of people are their children. I offer as a brief descriptive definition of “sacrament” in this broad but deeply traditional sense that any person, place, thing, or event, any sight, sound, taste, smell, or touch that causes us to perceive the deep grace at the roots of all creation is a sacrament. The grace is always there but not always noticed. A sacrament is whatever causes us to see, embrace and give thanks for the self-giving of God which undergirds everything that exists. I have long thought that we owe the most beautiful statement of this sacramental principle in the English language to the great Jesuit poet Gerard Manly Hopkins: “These things, these things were here and but the beholder/ Wanting.”

What happened to Peter, James and John atop the mountain is that they begin to see sacramentally. They see Jesus as he truly and deeply is. The story is at least as much about the disciples’ changed way of seeing as Jesus’ changed way of appearing. And that may be why the transfiguration story is traditionally read on the second Sunday in Lent. As we prepare to renew our acceptance of and commitment to the sacramental event which introduced us (many of us even as infants) into the transfigured world that Christ embodied and revealed, we are reminded that grace, the self-giving love of God, is all around us and within us at all times. The whole of Catholic life in worship, in action, in reflection, individually and communally, is an immense formation program designed to produce sacramental beholders. If we are prepared to see sacramentally, we are ready to go where Lent will take us next.</blockquote>