Last Sunday, as Lent began, I invited you to recognize that prayer, fasting and alsmgiving, the ancient pillars on which Lent has rested since the earliest centuries of the Church, far from being out-dated or old-fashioned, as many today would have us believe, take us to the very heart of the challenges currently facing the developed world. Now, today, on the Second Sunday, I would like to look more closely at what we said last week about the first of these pillars, prayer.
As I explained last week, we are not talking here about praying for things. I quoted the Irish-born Jesuit, William Johnston, a man who has spent most of his life working in Japan exploring the link between Eastern and Western spirituality. Speaking of the crisis facing the Church today, he writes: We must give people mysticism or die, a phrase which sums up not only my own deepest convictions about what is going in the world, but the hopes and dreams I have for each one of you. And I went on to say that mysticism has nothing to do with having visions or other exotic spiritual experiences. It is, in fact, about something very simple. It’s about an inner transformation, leading to transfiguration as, for the first time, we begin to see the world as it really is. The disciples in today’s Gospel lived with Jesus and thought they knew him. But they had had hardly begun to know him. There were hidden depths to Jesus they just could not see and when, for even a moment, they were able to glimpse this reality, it blew their minds. And it’s the same with all reality. There is always more to it than meets the eye and to begin to see that ‘more’, whether it is through science, art, music, poetry or the kind of prayer, which embraces all of these, is the beginning of mysticism. A whole new dimension opens up to us as we begin to see the world and people as God sees them. It is to make that journey from religion to faith, from having heard of God to knowing God and until it happens to us, we are like blind people looking at a great work of art or deaf people listening to a Beethoven symphony. The final, complete transfiguration of the way we perceive reality will, of course, only come when, beyond death, we share the life of God himself. But it is a process which can begin now. So how does it happen? Well, clearly, prayer, properly understood, is central to it. In today’s Gospel, Jesus takes Peter, James and John up the mountain to pray and it is there, in prayer, that their perception of Jesus deepens and they glimpse previously unseen truths about him. But the real message for us in today’s liturgy, lies, not in the Gospel, but in the first reading.
It’s a strange story, with all that stuff about the three-year-old heifer, the three-year-old goat, the three-year-old ram, the turtledove and the young pigeon being cut in half. But it’s not as daft as it sounds. At a time when there were no such things as legal documents, this, as you may remember from previous years, was the way people in those days sealed contracts or agreements. Having cut the animals in two, both parties to the contract would walk between the parts, symbolizing their recognition that whoever broke the agreement deserved to be treated like the animals. In the Genesis story, however, only God passes between the animals. Abraham is put into a deep sleep, the same ‘deep sleep’ Adam is put into in that other Genesis story where God created Eve from Adam’s rib. And the purpose of both stories is to make clear that both creation and the Covenant are God’s initiative. The ‘deep sleep’ both passages speak of is like the anaesthetic used in surgery. It allows God, the surgeon in this case, to do things deep within us, and the only role we have in the operation is to be there.
And this is a powerful image of the prayer that leads to transformation and transfiguration. It is something God does in us, and one of the great consolations in the story for those of us who have spent our lives dozing off during prayer is that he can do it even while we are asleep. Jesus tells us in the Gospel, in one of my favourite parables, that the Kingdom of God is like a seed planted in the earth. How it grows the farmer does not know, but grow it does, even while he sleeps. All he can do is observe it and be thankful for it, something I had occasion to do myself this week.
It was on Tuesday. The first reading that day was about how the Word of God is like the rain and snow that falls on the earth making it yield seed for the sower and bread for the eating: it never returns to him empty, without carrying out his will and succeeding in what it was sent to do. And as I sat here in the church before the Blessed Sacrament reflecting on that image, a thousand memories passed before me. Some were significant moments in my life and some were not, but the overwhelming sense I had was of how much I have changed without being able to pinpoint when that change happened. My ideas about God have changed beyond recognition over the years as have my ideas about so many things. The journey from religion to faith has been going on all my life and is still going on, but how exactly it has happened remains a mystery to me. I know prayer has played a part in it, but I also know that hours and hours and hours of that prayer have been spent asleep or thinking about about last night’s football. On more than one occasion, I have been very close to falling off the end of the bench I was sitting on.
And yet God has done his work, as he does it in each of us. And what I invite you to do today is recognize this. Spend time reflecting on the changes that have taken place in you over the years. Observe how God has been slowly but surely drawing you to himself. Feel that drawing still going on as he leads you, sometimes in the face of your own resistance, to new and deeper ways of thinking and understanding. Recognize how transfiguration has gradually been taking place in your life as you have learned to see the world and other people in new ways. Be thankful for it. And if you have slept through a lot of it, don’t worry. You are part of a very long tradition.
For centuries, Lent has been a time for prayer. And so we ask God for the grace we need to give time to prayer this Lent and so be available to all that God longs to do in us. We ask, especially, for a profound openness to the grace of transfiguration so that we can begin to see the world and everything in it as they really are, which is to see them as God sees them…………..Lord hear us
To spend time in prayer is to spend time with endless distractions. All kinds of thoughts will pass through our minds and there will be times when we cannot concentrate even for a moment. Often, we will fall asleep. The danger then is that we give up, thinking that it is all hopeless and that we will never be able to pray properly. And so we ask for the wisdom we need to see through this temptation and do the only thing we can do sometimes: be there. …………………………………….Lord hear us
In the first reading, God tells Abraham to look up to heaven and count the stars if he can, promising that his descendents will be as many as these. Abraham believes him and this is what justified him. And so we pray for the grace we need to believe the promises made to us by God. We pray, especially, that no matter what happens in the world around us, we will never lose confidence in the ultimate triumph of God over evil and the final coming of the Kingdom……………..Lord hear us
Abraham is father in faith to millions of men and women in the world today, whether they be Jews, Moslems or Christians. And so we pray for greater understanding between all these sons and daughters of the Patriarch, especially in the Middle East where, for centuries, we have been in constant conflict. And we pray especially for for the Moslem who have recently begun to use our hall for Friday Prayer, that this sharing of resources will be a blessing both for us and for them…………Lord hear us
The voice that comes from the cloud in the story of the transfiguration says; ‘This is my Son, the Chosen one. Listen to him.’ And so we pray for the grace to do that in our own lives. We pray that we will listen to everything he says in the Gospels, especially those things which challenge our deepest fears and prejudices and call us beyond the limits of our own narrow, limited thinking……………………………….Lord hear us
The debate with Des Browne about the replacement Trident takes place here in the church this afternoon. The government has called for a period of consultation on the subject and, given that our MP is also the Defence Minister, we have a unique role to play in this process. And so we pray that the debate will be a model of how people in a democracy should listen to each other with respect and be open to other people’s truth when it challenges our own…………...Lord hear us
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It would be good to hear people's experience of God working even when we are asleep or distracted. How convinced are we that prayer is God's initiative and how often are we deceived by the thought that I can't do this properly and so it isn't worth doing? There are even times when I think God 'puts us to sleep'so that he can work deep in us. Does this seem credible to you?
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