Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Readings: Isaiah 65:17-21; Ps 30:2.4-6.11-13; John 4:43-54

We too quickly become accustomed to a debased Christianity, making it a philosophy of life, a culture, or, worse yet, a politics, which can help but be disengaged from Jesus’ teachings in one way or another. We’ve reached that point in Lent where we are confronted with and by Jesus through the readings, particularly the Gospel readings.

Our Gospel today immediately follows Jesus’ encounter with the woman in Samaria. At the end of that encounter, at the urging of the inhabitants of the Samaritan village, he stayed with them for two days.¹

According to John’s itinerary, Jesus passes through Samaria as he returns to his native Galilee from a trip to Jerusalem. Because Jesus performed no miracles for his fellow Galileans before his journey to Jerusalem but wowed the Galileans who were also in Jerusalem during a major feast with signs and wonders, they gleefully welcomed him back as he entered Cana of Galilee, where, the inspired author reminds us, he turned water into wine at a wedding feast.

In the fourth Gospel, the miracle at the wedding feast in Cana marks the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Of course, this miracle is the second Luminous Mystery of the Holy Rosary. This mystery’s fruit is to Jesus through Mary.

If you remember, the Lord was reluctant to do something to help at the wedding when all the wine had been consumed. He only intervened because of his mother. She forced the issue by telling the servants, with reference to her Son- “Do whatever he tells you.”²

In today’s Gospel, the lack of belief on the part of his fellow Galileans, indicated by their fickleness, was seen by Jesus for what it was: bad faith, which is no faith at all. Far from being elated by his triumphant return, he seems to be not disappointed as much as disgusted.

Jesus’ disgust is brought into bold relief when his response to the royal official’s request that he go with him to Capernaum to heal his son, who was close to death, was: “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.”³ Nonetheless, in his mercy, he healed the man's son, saving him from death.

The Lord’s response stands in contrast to a common misconception about him. This misconception is something like the “Buddy Christ” from Kevin Smith’s movie Dogma. In this film, Buddy Christ is the central feature in what is just an ad campaign, as so many “evangelization” programs tend to be. The name of the campaign is “Catholicism Wow!”

Cardinal Glick, the driving force behind the ad campaign, played by the late George Carlin, notes that because too many people find the crucifix “wholly depressing,” the Church is retiring it and replacing it with the Buddy Christ. It is a Sacred Heart statue featuring a smiling and winking Jesus, who points at onlookers with one hand while giving the thumbs-up sign with the other.

As we profess in the Creed, Jesus is “true God from true God.” His divinity is made manifest through his humanity. In his person, humanity and divinity are wholly integrated, making him “the perfect man.”⁴ It is through his very person, in which divinity and humanity perfectly cohere, that he seeks to restore our likeness to God, which is lost through sin.⁵ Another word for this is “divinization.”

Because we are not like God, which means we are not yet fully human, we sometimes find Jesus’ words and disposition puzzling. But we can be quite sure that while he certainly performed signs and wonders, Jesus did not come to launch a divine shock and awe campaign that we could call “God Wow!”

Our Gospel today is a variation on theme which comes to full fruition at the end of the Gospel According to Saint John, when “doubting” Thomas can see and touch the risen Lord: “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”⁶

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1 See John 4:1-42..^↩
2 See John 2:1-12.^↩
3 John 4:48.^↩
4 Second Vatican Council. Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World [Gaudium et Spes], sec. 22.^↩
5 Ibid.^↩
6 John 20:29.^↩

Fourth Sunday of Lent- Second Scrutiny

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1b.6-7.10-13a; Psalm 23:1-6; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

Today we celebrate Latare Sunday. Latare Sunday is a day of rejoicing within the otherwise austere season of Lent. t all Sundays in Lent remain celebrations of the Lord’s resurrection, which is why, when calculating how long Lent is, you do not count Sundays.

Today we have a great reason to rejoice: the Second Scrutiny of our Elect. Rather than scrutinize them, we bless and strengthen them to scrutinize themselves. Indeed, for all of us, the season of Lent is a time for self-examination, a time for renewing our practice of the core spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, which should be characteristic of our lives as Christians all the time.

Our Gospel for the First Scrutiny, which we celebrated last Sunday at the 9:00 AM Mass, was Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman. In that encounter, Jesus declared himself forthrightly to be the Messiah, the one for whom the woman was hopefully waiting. I think it is easily lost on us how astounding it is that Jesus, a man whom this woman encounters while he sits by Jacob’s well, the one who engages her in a bit of an enigmatic dialog, is the Messiah, the one who will tell her everything.¹

We easily forget that it was not intuitively obvious to the casual observer in first-century Israel that this guy from Nazareth, Mary and Joseph’s son, was not only the Messiah, God’s anointed, but the only begotten Son of God in the flesh. Something quite similar is at work in our Gospel today. But before coming to that, it bears noting that David is a messianic figure. Our first reading today serves to demonstrate something Saint Paul describes well:

God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God²

Jesus, the unexpected, unassuming, and often unwelcome Messiah, is the exemplar of this divinely revealed truth.

Apart from Jesus and the healed man, only some of Jesus’ disciples witnessed this unprecedented healing. While it quickly became evident, despite doubts, that something amazing had happened when this man who everyone knew was blind could now see, the divine origin of the power that healed him was called into question. But, when queried, all the man could say, was this Jesus fellow smeared mud on his eyes and now he could see.

It wasn’t until after his ordeal with the Pharisees that Jesus revealed to the man to whom he gave sight who he is using almost the exact same words he used when revealing his identity to the Samaritan woman. This tells us something deeply important about faith. When the man asks, in response to Jesus’ question about whether he believes in the Son of Man, “who is he that I might believe in him?,” Jesus responded with “You have seen him” and, in so many words, “It is me, one speaking with you.”³

To see Jesus for who he is is to see reality in a whole new way. Or stated another way, to really see Jesus is to really see. One way to understand the man’s washing his eyes in the Pool of Siloam is as a kind of baptism, washing. To see and believe in Jesus Christ is what it means to have eyes to see. We also must have ears to hear and hearts that love him enough to live according to his words. Hope is the flower of faith and charity is its fruit.

Someone who is infused with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love is someone who nurtures these by praying, fasting, and giving alms, thus living as a child of the light. There is no better segue to the third and final scrutiny, the Gospel for which is Jesus calling his dead friend Lazarus forth from the tomb, than the ending of our second reading, which New Testament scholars think was taken from an early Christian baptismal hymn:

Awake, O sleeper,
and arise from the dead,
and Christ will give you light⁴

You see, Jesus did not just give the man his eyesight. He gave him life!

Friday afternoon, a friend, who is an educator, texted me asking how I might respond to the question “What are people for?” My answer came quite quickly. I texted him that my answer is the answer to the third question from the old Baltimore Catechism. The first question is, “Who made us?” “Us,” of course, refers to human beings. The third question, which contains the answer to the first, is “God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.”⁵

Alternatively, I texted, riffing off Saint Irenaeus of Lyons’ insistence that “the glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God,” I texted him that what people are for is to show forth God’s glory.”⁶

The man to whom Jesus gave sight didn’t glorify God merely by receiving his sight, though this miracle, as Jesus intimates, was wrought on behalf of this blind man so “the works of God might be made visible through him.”⁷ He glorified God by confessing his belief in Jesus and then worshipping him.⁸

Mass comes from the Latin word missa, which literally means to be dismissed. Missa is also the root of the word missio, which translates into English as “mission.” And so, at the end of each Mass, all of us are sent forth on mission to proclaim the Gospel.

Just as the Samaritan woman eagerly told her fellow villagers about Jesus, can you imagine the man who was formerly blind not telling others what Jesus had done for him? Rather than apologetics that traffics in proofs and arguments, telling others what Jesus has done for you what it really means to evangelize, to tell others the Good News.

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1 See John 4:5-42..^↩
2 1 Corinthians 1:27-29.^↩
3 John 9:36-37.^↩
4 Ephesians 5:14.^↩
5 Baltimore Catechism. Lesson One. Question 3.^↩
6 Saint Irenaeus of Lyons. Against the Heretics, Book 4, Chapter 20, Section 7.^↩
7 John 9:3.^↩
8 John 9:38.^↩

Monday of the Third Week of Lent

Readings: 2 Kings 5:1-15ab; Ps 42:2-3; 43:3-4; Luke 4:24-30

A question posed by our readings today is “Are you open to letting Jesus challenge you or do you only look to him for consolation?” Because this question points to an important aspect of repentance, it is relevant to our observance of Lent.

One risk for those of us who seek to practice our faith daily run is the routinization of our practice. On the one hand, when it comes to practicing spiritual discipline, habitus is necessary. In other words, it is important to observe fixed times for prayer and plan days for fasting, to set aside time for spiritual reading, to practice solitude and silence, to pray the Rosary, do the Examen, or pray the Liturgy of the Hours.

The risk we need to recognize is becoming content and self-satisfied with your spiritual routine, which amounts to something like the feeling that you’ve domesticated God. When practiced well, these disciplines should open you to the movements of the Holy Spirit, not close you off to what the Spirit might be trying to say, and what changes is the Spirit prompting you to make. Change in response to the word of God is the definition of repentance.

In the spiritual life, to say that God is infinite, that is, unbounded, means something quite practical. There is always more to God than any of us can perceive at any moment. As Pope Francis taught:

The word of God… comes as “a surprise, since our God is the God of surprises: he comes and always does new things. He is newness. The Gospel is newness. Revelation is newness”¹

Hence, you must be careful not to build your spiritual life on the foundation of your preconceptions about God. Of course, we all have preconceptions. But over time, your understanding of God should grow and deepen. To grow in the knowledge of God, which is the end toward which the practice of the spiritual disciplines is the means, leads inevitably to loving God more. Just as inevitably, growing in love of God leads to an increased love of neighbor.

It is clear in each of the Gospels that Jesus was not the Messiah most Jews of his day expected, he did not conform to their preconceptions, just as Elisha was not the miracle worker Naaman expected. Because of his pride, Naaman almost refused the cure he graciously received from God by heeding the prophet’s directions, which seemed demeaning to him.

The people of Nazareth, most of whom would’ve been related to Jesus in some way, rejected God’s anointed and even sought to kill him. According to Luke, after marveling at his words indicating he was the fulfillment of the Messianic prophecy from the portion of the scroll of Isaiah that he had just read to them in the synagogue, the backlash with which our Gospel reading ends seems to have been prompted by someone then asking, “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?”² In other words, “We know this guy. How can he be the Messiah?”

Are you willing to let Jesus, through the power of the Spirit, unsettle you and maybe blow up your expectations? Is your soul still thirsty for God, or do you feel like you’ve drunk your fill?

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1 Pope Francis. Daily Meditation for 20 January 2014.^↩
2 Luke 4:22.^↩

Third Sunday of Lent- First Scrutiny

Readings: Ex 17:3-7; Ps 95:1-2.6-9; Rom 5:1-2.5-8; John 4:5-42

“Stay thirsty,” so we are advised by the most interesting man in the world. It’s better, however, to phrase this as a question before employing it as an exhortation. So, existentially speaking, Are you thirsty? If you are thirsty, what are you thirsty for?

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that our humanity largely consists of our desire, our longing. We desire, we long for, health, fulfillment, contentment, achievement, love, influence, satisfaction. It’s often the case, to quote the Rolling Stones, despite trying and trying, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” One thing to point out about the list above is that some of the things we long for are at odds with other things we desire.

Desire is the genesis of hope. Hope is perhaps best defined as desire properly directed. All earthly things fade away: money, possessions, accomplishments, even lovely sunny days at the beach. In his letter to the wealthy widow, Proba, after noting that “so far as this world is concerned, [you are] noble and wealthy, and the mother of such an illustrious family, and, although a widow, not desolate,” Saint Augustine commends her for “wisely” understanding “that in this world and in this life the soul has no sure portion.”¹

In other words, this wealthy Roman widow lived in hope, which flowed from understanding what she truly desired. But to be precise, it is not a what but a who that is the proper object of human desire: Jesus Christ. It is Christ and him alone who provides the living water welling up to eternal life. Eternal life, as Augustine so emphatically points out multiple times in his letter to Proba, is the life that is truly life. It is the life we desire, a life without lack.

To understand this, to want this, to believe this, and live according to this is what it means to receive the gift of hope, which, along with faith and charity, is a theological virtue. While faith, hope, and charity are gifts from God, you can and should cultivate these virtues, just like you cultivate the natural virtues. One way to cultivate the virtue of hope is to understand that, just as eternal life is fully realized beyond death, hope lies beyond optimism. As statesman, playwright, and philosopher Vaclav Havel observed:

Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons²

And so, every disappointment, every loss, every sorrow, every moment of emptiness and pain is an opportunity to cultivate the theological virtue of hope as we, Eve’s poor banished children, make our way through what is quite often a valley of tears.

Immediately preceding the verses from the fifth chapter of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans that comprise our second reading, we hear that, as Christians,

we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, endurance proven character, and proven character, hope and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us³

Woman at the Well, by Carl Bloch, 1865-1879

We can safely say that the woman Jesus encountered at the well in Samaria did not lack desire. After all, she had been married five times and was now living with a man to whom she was not married. It seems quite clear that she didn’t lack optimism either! Nonetheless, she was not entirely without hope.

Her hope is evidenced by her pointing to the coming of the Messiah, who “will tell us everything.”⁴ Imagine her disorientation when she heard Jesus say, “I am he, the one speaking with you.”⁵ His claim was made plausible by his telling her the truth about her life, telling her things about herself that there was no way he could know because she had never met him before.

Jesus Christ is our hope. He opens the door to eternal life. He is the one, as Saint Paul writes, “through whom we have gained access by faith to this grace in which we stand.”⁶ This “grace in which we stand” is nothing less than God sharing divine life with us.

God’s primary means of imbuing us with his very life, which is nothing less than his very self, are the sacraments. This is most clearly manifest in the Eucharist, which “is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows.”⁷

Baptism, which is strengthened (i.e., “confirmed”) by confirmation, is the gateway to the Eucharist. In baptism, you don’t merely drink from the well of eternal life, you are immersed in it, it becomes the grace in which you not only stand but in which you live, move, and have your being. To use a metaphor to describe what the great theologian Karl Rahner pointed out in his Meditations on the Sacraments, we swim in grace like fish swim in water.⁸

The difference between you and a fish is that you are capable of living this as a conscious reality, which is what it means to live a graceful life, a hopeful life. Baptism is not just a gaining of the new moniker “Catholic” or “Christian.” It is Jesus calling you forth from the tomb like he called his friend Lazarus, but that is to get ahead of ourselves.

Through the waters of baptism, as Saint Paul points out in the very next chapter of Romans in a verse that is part of our epistle reading for the Great Easter Vigil, preparation for which is what today’s scrutiny is all about, by the power of the Holy Spirit, you die, are buried, and are raised to new life in Christ. Eternal life is not only the life you hope for after death. Eternal life begins with your sacramental death and resurrection enacted through Baptism.

In this life, the Christian daily lives the tension between the already and not yet of life eternal. It is the Eucharist, that is, Christ himself, that fills your emptiness and quenches your thirst. So, until the day your hope is fully realized, stay thirsty, which is to say, remain hopeful.

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1 Saint Augustine. Letter to Proba, an2154, 1.1.^↩
2 Vaclav Havel. Disturbing the Peace, pp 181-182.^↩
3 Romans 5:3-5.^↩
4 John 4:25.^↩
5 John 4:26.^↩
6 Romans 5:2.^↩
7 Second Vatican Council. Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy [Sacrosanctum Concilium], sec. 10.^↩
8 Karl Rahner. Meditations on the Sacraments, Introduction.^↩

Leap Year reflection- Lent a time of hope for change

Since 29 February only comes around once every four years, I wanted to seize the day and post something to mark the occasion. Since 29 February falls during the season of Lent, what comes immediately to my mind is Trevor Hudson's observation that each season of the liturgical year is a "time-gift." These seasons are gifts because they "help us participate more fully in what God has done in human history" (Pauses for Lent: 40 Words for 40 Days. Upper Room Books. Kindle Edition, Location 77).

I receive 29 February as a time-gift. It is the gift of an extra day, not of Lent because even during Leap Year, Lent remains the same length, and not of life because my life is however long it is going to be. It merely adds a day to this year: AD2024. The last Leap Year was in 2020, the time of pandemic panic. It's hard to forget all the lamentations and jokes about, of all years, 2020 being longer.

Time is a strange thing. Our ways of marking time, while not exactly arbitrary, have nothing of the absolute about them. According to our solar calendar, a year is the amount of time it takes the Earth to do a complete rotation around the sun.

At its most basic, time is a function of change. If you think about a mechanical clock, one with a second hand, a second is a measurement of how long it takes for the hand to move from one tick mark to the next. This also shows us that space and time, while distinct in a way, are inextricably bound together.

Isn't Lent also about change?

One of the few complex philosophical ideas Pope Francis evokes quite regularly is the insistence that "time is greater than space." His reason for doing this is to bring forward the idea that genuine human progress (i.e., change/conversion), our progress towards becoming ever authentically human, is a function of time. Rather than a quantum leap, true conversion is a progression, something that happens over time and through experience. As the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes ("Joy and hope"), beautifully articulates, Jesus Christ is the "perfect" human being (sec. 22).

This brings us back to Lent as a "time-gift." In reality, every day is a time-gift, is it not? Any day and every day can be New Year's Day, a new beginning. Just as most every Friday (solemnities excepted) is a "little" Good Friday and every Sunday, including Sundays of Lent (which don't count against the 40 days), is a "little" Easter, every going to sleep is a "little" death and every awakening is a "little" resurrection. We must reconnect liturgy to life!

I used to find C.S. Lewis' insistence that "Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done" very discouraging (from Letters to Malcom, Chiefly on Prayer). Then I realized how ridiculous it is, especially given life's dynamism, to think- "Why can't I just put my trust in God and be done with it?" In other words, "Why can't I just stand here and not move?" Time is greater than space.

In his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, a substantial draft of which he inherited from Pope Benedict, we find several Bergoglian interjections. One of those can be found at the end of the letter's fifty-seventh section. This section is a beautiful meditation on the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. Its main focus, however, is hope. It deals with how hope integrates faith and love (i.e., caritas, charity).

Let us refuse to be robbed of hope, or to allow our hope to be dimmed by facile answers and solutions which block our progress, "fragmenting" time and changing it into space. Time is always much greater than space. Space hardens processes, whereas time propels towards the future and encourages us to go forward in hope

Monday of the Second Week of Lent

Readings: Daniel 9:4b-10; Psalm 79:8-9.11.13; Luke 6:36-38

Befitting this holy season, our Liturgy of the Word today looks something like a penitential rite. It begins with an acknowledgment of sin:

We have sinned, been wicked and done evil; we have rebelled and departed from your commandments and your laws. We have not obeyed your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name…¹

Then, in our Responsorial, we move to something akin to a Kyrie, a plea for God’s mercy: “Lord, do not deal with us according to our sins.”²

Jesus, in our Gospel reading, gives us the conditions for receiving God’s forgiveness, which is a gift, a grace.

In our contemporary idiom, karma, a Buddhist term, refers to getting what you deserve. If you spend any time on social media, you read quite a few invocations of karma. As Christians, we are people of grace. I don’t know about you, but I will take grace over karma any day.

Theologically, grace usually refers to unmerited favor given us by God. In other words, God doesn’t grace us because we deserve it. He graces us because God is God and self-giving constitutes divine nature at its deepest level.³

If I want to receive God’s grace given in Christ through the Spirit’s power, I must be willing to extend that same grace to others. Among these “others” to whom I must extend grace are not only but especially my enemies.

In a few moments, gathered around the Lord’s Table, we will pray “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”⁴ If you’re praying this prayer intentionally, you are accepting God’s condition for forgiving you. What you’re praying is something like “God forgive me both on the condition that I forgive others and to the extent that I forgive others.”

In our Gospel today, Jesus says, “Forgive and you will be forgiven.”⁵ You know from experience that it is often easier to invoke karma over someone who has wronged you than it is to extend the grace of forgiveness, let alone do what the Lord enjoins in the verse immediately preceding the first verse of our Gospel for today- to love that and do good to that person.⁶

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1 Daniel:5-6.^↩
2 Psalm 79:9; Lectionary 230.^↩
3 See Philippians 2:5-11. ^↩
4 Roman Missal. The Order of Mass, The Communion Rite, sec. 124.^↩
5 Luke 6:37. ^↩
5 Luke 6:35.^↩

Christian Metamorphosis

Readings: Gen 22:1-2.10-13.15-18; Ps 116:10.15-19; Rom 8:31b-34; Mark 9:2-10

Lent is about transformation, that is, metamorphosis.

The Eucharist is about transformation, that is metamorphosis.

Eucharistic transformation is not primarily about what we label "transubstantiation."

Mainly, Eucharistic transformation is about how our reception of Holy Communion makes us the Body of Christ. This is why the most important part of the eucharistic liturgy, the part to which it all builds, is the Communion Rite.

At the end of the day, the only convincing "proof" (or disproof) that our meager gifts of bread and wine become Christ's body and blood are the lives of those of us who partake of it. Does the change provoke a response?

Living a eucharistic life, which is living a life of thanksgiving, is to be an evangelist.

Apologetics is just apologetics. Nonetheless, apologetically speaking, if the Eucharist doesn't produce the effects it claims or any discernible effects at all, then no matter how elegant your theory (theology), how real can it be?

Metamorphosis is the Greek word translated as "transfigured" in our Gospel for today.

What if instead of beholding a vision that somehow exists outside of reality, or even outside of time (let's think in a quantum way), Jesus' "transfiguration," his metamorphosis, how Peter, James, and John see him in this encounter, is seeing him as he really is all the time?

In beholding Jesus on the mountain top, seeing also Moses and Elijah, and hearing the voice of the Father, I assert the three men are having an intense experience of reality, of the world.

What do I mean by "world" in this context?

Wittgenstein began his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with-

1. The world is everything that is the case.
    1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
          1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.
          1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is                    not the case
         1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

I agree with Dallas Willard, who was a philosophy professor as well as a great Christian spiritual teacher, when he insisted that not only do we interact with the material world mainly by means of our minds, but that "We bring the reality of God into our lives by making contact with him through our minds." Our actions, in turn, result from that contact (Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23, 8).

The Transfiguration of the Lord, by D. Nollet, 1694

For a Christian, that Jesus is the beloved Son of the Father is a fact, not a myth or merely a nifty-keen way to make sense of the world but only one of several equally viable options. While I suppose Jesus' Lordship is a fact both in the world and about the world, more importantly, it is the fact that constitutes the world.

To understand Jesus as Messiah is to revere him as Lord. In this pericope, the fact of Jesus' unique and divine Sonship is shown by there not being "anyone but Jesus alone" after the cloud lifted and the divine voice trailed off. This is meant to show that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law (Moses) and the Prophets (Elijah). He is the full revelation of Father.

Because I don't want to make a mockery of Wittgenstein's careful thinking by quoting him inappropriately, far from acknowledging Jesus as Lord, Wittgenstein, citing Paul's insistence that "no one can say, 'Jesus is Lord,' except by the holy Spirit" (1 Cor 12:3), averred that that claim said "nothing" to him. Why did the philosopher balk at acknowledging Jesus as Lord? "Because I do not believe that he will come to judge me" (Culture and Value, 37).

Wittgenstein insisted that the idea of Jesus returning to judge the living and the dead, as Christians profess in the Creed, also said nothing to him. Jesus judging him, he continued, "could say something to me, only if I lived completely differently" (Ibid.). This is the crux of the matter, isn't it?

This metamorphosis that causes you to live completely differently does not result in you being changed into something or someone completely different. Rather, it is to be changed into someone completed. To become who God made and redeemed you to be is what it means to be sanctified.

The first lesson in what means to rise from the dead is understanding that first you must die.

"I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice..." (Rom 12:1). It is by so doing, by the grace of God, you start to "be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you might discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect" (Rom 12:2).

How else can you offer yourself except through the Eucharist, in which we pray that Christ by the Spirit's power "make of us an eternal offering" to the Father? (Eucharistic Prayer II)

Taking a cue from Saint Ignatius of Loyola, this transfiguration requires you not only to discern what is good and pleasing and perfect but to endeavor to act on what you discern, no matter what it may be. We don't call Abraham our Father in faith for nothing.