My great friend in Ireland, Father Barry Horan, is one of the happiest and most delightful priests you'll ever meet. I hope you will meet him when travelling is possible again.
But when Father Barry sends me a book, it’s usually a serious one—he's a very smart man who realizes that happiness is a serious problem.
For Christmas he sent me a book by the American writer Robert Wicks called Heartstorming: Creating a Place God Can Call Home. When I picked it up this week the book fell open to a chapter titled “My Soul is Tired.”
And that, dear friends, sums up how I feel this Second Sunday of Lent. My soul is tired.
I’m sure many of you feel the same way; in fact, I know many of you feel the same way, since you’ve told me what you’re dealing with. In the months since Christmas, there’s been more sorrow and struggle in the parish than there was in the first ten months of the pandemic.
This is not the place for details—but, trust me, there’s a lot of suffering out there.
Not all these rough things are a direct result of the pandemic. Some are just coincidence. But there’s much happening to make my own soul feel very weary.
Robert Wicks writes about the “gray” times in our lives. And he says that we can truly benefit from them if we don’t just ignore or play down our troubled feelings.
Our “low” points, he says, can bring spiritual blessings if we intentionally bring God into the times that are “difficult, disappointing, troubling, confusing… or sad.”
I don’t know about you, but my first thought is to ask God to get rid of these feelings, not to invite him in. But Wicks says by exploring them with God we can learn a great deal about ourselves and, more importantly, a great deal about God’s love.
In today’s second reading, St. Paul teaches that bad times are never the worst of times if we face them knowing God’s love. The apostle is writing about some of the terrible things he’s had to deal with—worse than what most of us face. Can misery separate us from the love of Christ? Is there anything so awful that it overwhelms God’s love in our hearts?
Paul all but shouts: No! No, whether life is all dark or just gray, God is with us, for us, and loving us.
He certainly knew Psalm 116, which we heard just before the second reading. He would have prayed it with conviction in all the many trials he faced: “I kept my faith, even when I said, ‘I am greatly afflicted.’”
I want to be able to pray those words myself in every difficulty. I want to keep my own faith strong, even in the roughest of times. But how?
Paul offers a two-part answer: first, by trusting that God is for us, not against us. He wants our good and our happiness. Second, by understanding that God who gave his only Son for us—the greatest gift imaginable—will not now abandon us to our troubles.
In case we miss that message, the first reading underlines it in red with the story of Abraham and Isaac. It still sends a chill up our spines. We don’t know how God the Father felt about sending his Son for us, since that’s beyond human comprehension. But we can all imagine how Abraham felt. This ancient story helps us to appreciate how much love there is behind the incarnation and the suffering of Christ.
Knowing about such love, can we really think that God doesn’t care about our gray times, our low times, our hard times?
So where does the Gospel account of the Transfiguration fit in?
First, it reminds us that Jesus does care about how we feel. Since the Transfiguration is only a foretaste of the Resurrection, it’s important not for what happened but for why it happened. Jesus is strengthening these key disciples to face his suffering and death. He cares enough to want to strengthen them in advance with a preview of the happy ending to the story of his Passion.
He wants us also to be strengthened by his Resurrection from the dead—to be strong enough to face any and every trial. As today’s Psalm says, “I kept my faith, even when I said, ‘I am greatly afflicted.’”
The Transfiguration also says something to us in our current circumstances. Jesus granted Peter and James and John more than knowledge; he gave them an experience—an experience not only of himself but of Elijah and Moses, who were so present on the mountain that Peter wanted to build them each a little chalet.
No less than on the mount of Transfiguration, Jesus wants us to experience his glory, the Law and the Prophets, and each other. He wants to gather us around him, right here in this church.
Only he can’t—at least not without getting a ticket from the Health Authority.
Yet Christians are an experiential, incarnational, and existential community. We are meant to gather. It is not good to be together only virtually.
Patiently we have waited; obediently we have waited. But the closing of churches—without sufficient evidence to justify it—has gone on too long. I am very pleased to tell you that Archbishop Miller has filed a formal request for reconsideration of the health order that has kept us away from Mass. And I encourage you to read the letter he’s written to Catholics explaining the reason for his decision.
Let us pray hard for a just and favourable response to the Archbishop’s request. Let us pray that before much longer we’ll look around this church and pray, “Lord, it is good for us to be here.”
And between now and then, let’s do some heartstorming, asking God into our gray times so he can show us his love and peace.
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