On bonding
Students at St. Augustine’s Seminary in Toronto take a very special trip every year. Actually there is one weekend every autumn when all the seminarians take two days to get away. It’s a kind of get-to-know-you weekend. Some of the men stay in the building but many of them go to other places for two days, just so that strangers can meet, and so that friends can deepen their acquaintances. Some may call them bonding weekends. Whether they involve hunting or fishing trips, or shopping adventures or road trips, we all know that these experiences have the potential to create memories and to bring people closer together. They also have the potential to drive us farther apart, but that’s a subject for another day.
Like human relationships, our relationship with God also can be strengthened when we experience something that bonds us together. We sometimes refer to such moments in our faith life as tests of faith: the events that seem to come our way and compel us to pray, because there is no other suitable response. Today’s first reading, taken from the book of Genesis shows us that such tests have existed since the beginning of recorded time. Can we even fathom the depth of questioning that must have been running through Abraham’s mind, or the conversations that must have occupied his prayer as he travelled with his son to the land of Moriah? What further desolation he must have known when God asked him not only to build an altar there, but to bind his son and offer him as a burnt offering?
On one hand, this experience might seem to be a story that belongs to another time, but this same story is played out every day as parents sit by helplessly and watch as children diagnosed with cancer or with some other debilitating disease must endure treatments of all kinds. There may be some here among us who also know this experience of helplessness because of relationships in their lives which have not turned out as well as they may have hoped. In these and many other experiences, humans find ourselves at a loss to explain or comprehend the why’s. We are reduced to prayer, the only thing that holds the promise of hope. I’ve often wondered how people face such questions if they don’t have the reassurance of faith.
The truth is that life has a way of posing all kinds of challenges, but those of us who have received the gift of faith have a secret weapon of sorts to help us face these challenges. Jesus took Peter, James and John up the mountain in order to show them that if they truly believed the lessons he was trying to teach, they could understand that he had come from God, and that he would one day return to God, where he would stand alongside Elijah and Moses, others of the most well-known of the prophets. This was also Jesus’ way of showing the disciples that the faith handed down by their ancestors was not the stuff of stories and fables, but truth that has the strength to sustain us even in times of darkest doubt.
You might say that the Transfiguration was Jesus’ way of taking a road trip with these three disciples; an opportunity for them to get to know him better. Not long after this experience, they themselves would have to face the ultimate test of their faith as Jesus would be condemned to death. He would have to suffer great torture, but he also knew that this was not the final word because physical death is only the means by which the door is opened for us to return to the Father. I wonder if they thought of their mountaintop experience as they stood by helplessly and watched him being condemned, scourged, and walking the road to Calvary, if they remembered the joy they experienced when they were tempted to build tents for Jesus and his companions when they witnessed him being crucified.
The good news is that eventually, the disciples did recover from this ordeal, and so can we. Enriched by their faith, they too taught Paul and others to understand that no hardship or test of faith can ever separate us from the love of Christ. With a bond such as this, we are able to look beyond the trials that life puts before us as we gather in faith here in this church and in other places throughout the world to praise and thank Him?
1 comment:
Timely and meaningful me at this very moment.
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