Dear Friends,
“The Lord God took Abram outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can.”” These words from our first reading, the Book of Genesis, struck a memory for me. We live with so much ambient light around us from homes, stores, streetlights, etc. that when we look up at the night sky, we see only a very tiny fraction of the stars that are up there. You need to go to a more remote location to appreciate what God is telling Abraham.
The memory that came to me was driving “upstate” in the Allentown Diocese near Leighton and driving over the mountain there. Without hardly any other lights around, stopping the car and looking up was absolutely amazing, breathtaking. The stars seemed to have multiplied. It was even more amazing while camping out West in a truly remote place, looking up and being bedazzled. I love seeing the images from the various space telescopes showing the glory of even more remote places of our universe.
All of this is God’s creation. It is His gift to us. But He didn’t stop there. Not at all. He is giving us Heaven, eternal life with Him, if we choose to walk in the footsteps of His Beloved Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. There is no other way to get to the Father except to embrace Jesus as Lord and live as He did. And we can do that because Jesus gives us His grace most especially in the Sacraments of His Church.
Our Gospel is the Transfiguration of Jesus before Peter, James, and John. They were privileged to see Jesus’ glory and power before His crucifixion. They didn’t understand it then but after the Resurrection, they did.
In the midst of our daily struggles, worries, anxieties; in the midst of a cruel and devastating war in Ukraine, with the threat of further conflict, we might begin to wonder where God is, how is God acting in all this. We must keep focused on the Cross of Christ which led to the Resurrection. I came across this excerpt of a reflection by John Cardinal O’Connor which struck me personally. I think it is worth pondering in this present moment ~
“O Lord Jesus…Did the pain shoot way past Your head and Your hands and Your feet deep, deep, deep into Your soul, so that You could no longer feel the touch of Your Father’s love in the numbness of it? …Is that why You understand how our faith falters and we’re not always sure of what we believe or why, and how much it hurts to be misunderstood or ridiculed or slandered or deserted or divorced or unwillingly pregnant or emptied by abortion? …You always knew Easter would come, even when it was almost impossible to believe and totally impossible to experience… What an absolutely marvelous wonder that You let us know, also, who You are, and about who we are in You, and about our own lives and sufferings and deaths, and that every bit of it can be meaningful even if not a single moment of it is easy” (from The Catholic New York, April 4, 1985).
Amen. Jesus is here with us, each, and every one of us throughout this whole world. May our Lenten journey help us to know Him, love Him, embrace Him more deeply and completely in every circumstance we encounter.
God bless you, God love you,
Monsignor McCulken
