Several years ago my wife Shelby and I had an opportunity to meet and have a conversation with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The one thing she and I most remember is how the archbishop literally glowed with the love of God. The few exceptionally holy people I have known have had that suffusion of glow.
In our gospel pericope (Luke 8:28-36) Jesus has taken his Executive Committee -- Peter, James, and John -- up a mountain for a retreat. There Jesus is transfigured; and the apostles see the glow. The context is Sukkoth, the feast of Booths, in which Jews to this day dine and spend time outdoors in a shelter, a sukkah, as a reminder of the years when the Hebrews of old were camped out in the desert enroute Sinai. Jesus is soon flanked by Moses and Elijah, representing the Law and the Prophets, in fulfillment of the expectation that thsee two ancestors would come to attest to the Messiah in his time. Once again, Luke doesn't quite grasp the meaning of a Jewish practice, thinks the booths are shrines, and, so, has Peter proposing to build three: one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. At that moment there is a theophany, as God speaks out from a cloud, endorsing Jesus as Son and the two spiritual ancestors vanish from sight.
Like Moses in our first reading, we may find ourselves beginning to glow from interaction with God. Opportunities are in Word and Sacrament, prayer and devotions, fasting, confession and meditation -- all that two thousand years of Catholic Christianity offer us. If we see Lent as a time to grow closer to God, we too may hear that divine voice assuring us of the Lordship of Jesus, so that with him and in him we can be transfigured into the people God wants us to be -- aglow with his love.
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