As we continue our meditations, especially focusing on
the Transfiguration, I would like to reflect on prayer. Studies show that prayer
is a very common, popular activity. Even many people who profess no belief in
God still pray!
But what precisely is prayer—or better, what ought it
to be? The Transfiguration is extremely instructive. We hear that Jesus took
Peter, James, and John with him “up the mountain to pray.” Now, as we’ve said
before, mountains are standard Biblical places of encounter with God. The idea
was that the higher you go, the closer you come to God.
We don’t have to be literal about this, but we should
unpack its symbolic sense. In order to commune with God, you have to step out
of your every day, workaday world. The mountain symbolizes transcendence,
otherness, the realm of God. If people say, “I pray on the go” or “my work is
my prayer,” they’re not really people of prayer.
Your mountain could be church, a special room in your
house, the car, or a corner of the natural world. But it has to be someplace
where you have stepped out of your ordinary business. And you have to take the
time to do it. Jesus and his friends literally stepped away in order to pray.
The text then says, “While he was praying, his face
changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white” (Luke 9:29). The
reference here is to Moses whose face was transfigured after he communed with
God on Mt. Sinai. But the luminosity is meant in general to signal the invasion
of God.
In the depths of prayer, when you have achieved a
communion with the Lord, the light of God’s presence is kindled deep inside of
you, at the very core of your existence. And then it begins to radiate out
through the whole of your being. That’s why it is so important that Luke
mentions the clothing of Jesus becoming dazzling white. Clothes evoke one’s contact
with the outside world.
The God discovered in prayer should radiate out
through you to the world, so that you become a source of illumination.
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