Tenison Woods and MacKillop Centre News: Remade in Christ

Jesus took with him Peter and John and James and went up the mountain to pray. As he prayed, the aspect of his face was changed and his clothing became brilliant as lightning.

Luke 9: 29

There is any number of programs on TV that renovate, make over or rebuild – homes, bathrooms, bodies, faces. The desire we have to upgrade and renew is unstoppable - bigger and better, faster and sleeker. Built-in obsolescence, poor quality materials, the dictates of fashion or thinness or beauty drive our consumerism. Ah, but to be fair, consumerism wasn’t invented in our lifetime. Having what the Jones’ have is as old as Cain and Abel [although that didn’t work out all too well].

Each of the synoptic Gospels recalls the story of the transfiguration wherein Jesus is with a group of disciples on a high mountain. Moses and Elijah appear and converse with Jesus. The disciples in their awe and eagerness wish to erect three tents [tabernacles]. Then a voice from the heavens utters: This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.

This event we name as the transfiguration. It looms large is the life and memory of the early church. It incorporates the story of Israel’s salvation, the messiahship and mission of Jesus, and reveals the transformation that awaits us within the kingdom (the here and now) but which also anticipates our own exaltation at the end of time.

The transfiguration reveals a part of the inner mystery of Jesus and part of our potential as human beings seeking divinity. Here is Jesus, alongside Moses, the redeemer of the Hebrews from their slavery in Egypt who represents the Law, with Elijah, the great prophet who worked miracles, who ascended into heaven in a whirlwind and who would return to announce the coming of the Messiah. Jesus stands alongside the Law and the Prophets both figuratively and literally.

The transfiguration gives us hope that we will be transformed, remade in Christ. No product we can buy, no acquisition or make over will effect what God alone can do. He will make us whole, accept who and what we are, allow us to be satisfied with what we have if we reject the endless desire to surround ourselves with things that cannot last.

As such the transfiguration is my story too. It is about my journey. It is about raising my consciousness and awareness of the presence of Jesus in my life and his capacity to transform me into a vehicle for his Good News. It is also your story should you choose to engage in and invest yourself in it. It needs to be retold in your own life, as a story of hope, as fulfilment of a promise.

Peter Douglas

HEAD OF SCHOOL SERVICES, NORTH

Not merely an era of change, but a change of era

by Richard Rohr

These recent words from Pope Francis are still begging humanity to recognize the seismic shift in consciousness that the Gospel is forever trying to bring about. But Pope Francis is also recognizing that the planet is changing at an alarming speed, and the church had best stop fearing change—or we are ill prepared to announce our own message. Grace and mercy are, and always will be, a radical shift from normal consciousness. We truly are entering a change of era. Until recently, Christianity has largely reflected the common consciousness instead of enlightening it. Nowhere is this more evident than in our preference for punishment over mercy.

“Mercy is the Lord’s most powerful message!” Pope Francis proclaimed at the beginning of his pontificate. [1] A few days later, he said, “Dear brothers and sisters, let us be enveloped by the mercy of God. . . . We will feel [God’s] wonderful tenderness, we will feel [God’s] embrace, and we too will become more capable of mercy, patience, forgiveness, and love.” [2] This is of such crucial importance that Pope Francis has declared this year an Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy. We will return to this theme throughout the year to make clear how it sets people and culture on an utterly different foundation and in a truly new direction.

I am so very grateful for Pope Francis, who I feel is himself a gift of God’s mercy to the Christian churches and to the world in this time of counting, weighing, and measuring everything for our own small advantage. If we truly understood (“stood under”) God’s mercy, we would see how we’ve gotten everything “upside down and backward,” as Fr. Thomas Keating loves to say. Most of us think and act as if God is a God of retribution and even eternal punishment. But the Bible, Jesus, and the mystics of all the world religions reveal that God is infinite love, which really changes everything. Most religious people have put the cart before the horse by imagining that we can earn God’s love by some kind of moral behavior. Whereas, according to the saints and mystics, God’s love must be experienced first—and then our moral behavior is merely an outflowing from our contact with that infinite source toward all other people and things. Love is the powerful horse; morality is then the beautiful cart that it pulls, not the other way around.

The passion of Pope Francis is to again make merciful love the foundation, the center, and the goal of Christianity. Love is not just the basis on which we build everything, but it’s also the energy with which we proceed, and it’s then the final goal toward which we tend. Love has two lovely daughters, twins called grace and mercy. Like identical twins, they are often indistinguishable: Grace is the inner freedom to be merciful. Mercy is grace in action. And both are the children of love.

To operate inside of this always new and open-ended field, is to live in a truly new era—where evil has no chance to fester, grow, or triumph—because if your only goal is to love, there is no such thing as failure. Really! Even, and most especially, failures are another occasion and opportunity to learn and practice love, even toward yourself. You deserve mercy too.

Gateway to Silence:

Everything is grace.