Energising belief

Today’s readings: Gen. 15, 5-12.17-18; Philippians 3, 17-4,1; Lk 9, 28-36.

Climbing up the mountain in the Scriptures means breaking with routine, being in search of what is beyond our earthly life, searching for the divine. This can be a luxury many of us cannot afford. Perhaps this is what the choice of three from the 12 implies. For many in today’s hectic life, Lent means nothing, it is business as usual. But to come to terms with oneself is a necessity.

Believing always entails a radical choice. Abraham had to risk in order to put faith in the Lord because the foundation on which faith rests is not our convictions or knowledge of God, but God’s covenant. God is faithful but to be touched by His faithfulness, one must first let go. It is not a matter of seeing to believe but of first believing in order then to see.

Then our seeing becomes sure evidence, as in the case of the three disciples on the mountain. Or as in the case of Patrick Flynn who, in his provocative book God the Evidence, lays out the astonishing new evidence that led him away from the atheism he acquired as a student.

Peter was reluctant to come down from the mountain once he had experienced God’s beauty. Because God is provocative, as He was with Abraham. When God is discovered as the true focus of our faith, we realise how relative our ways of conceiving His ways are, how relative all that we’ve put in our religion may be.

This explains why people today are disenchanted and explore other ways than those trodden in official religion in their genuine search to discern the divine in their lives.

On this Sunday we are called to a radical rethinking where faith is concerned. All that has been always proposed to us in formal religion, and unfortunately what many a time we continue to perpetuate, is only what we can see from a very limited human standpoint. We are invited to change standpoint, to go beyond the partial keyhole outlook of things.

This is the vision Jesus offered to his three disciples. Not that they understood anything at the time! But it was enough for them to grasp later, with hindsight, the meaning of what they were going through. This is the secret of faith’s perspective and the key that helps us see all things fall into place when the moment comes.

With God there is always a mo­ment that comes in time and that is the moment of grace, the right mo­ment when we behold and see. Be­fore that, there are many moments that remain dull, that weigh on us and on our faith; we go through ex­periences that remain disconnected between themselves. It is God who provides the connection, who helps us to put things together and see the entire picture hitherto unseen.

Abraham had to journey a very long way before coming to realise. What in the end made him realise what putting faith in the Lord was about, was that at each and every junction he came to, the Lord was there to sustain him. Putting faith in the Lord, as we see in the case of Peter, does not necessarily yield immediate results. It was unrealistic on his part to want simply to stop time. Life has to move on. He had to come down from the mountain.

But the moments of enlightenment that we may have are inklings that energise our belief, that give us assurance of things hoped for. We need those assurances though we cannot expect life to be so reassuring all the time.

God is totally the other, in the sense that we need to change wavelength to touch and be touched by Him. In short we need to exit from religion to grasp truly what religion entails.

This is an entirely new pedagogy on the part of God. God slowly and gradually is educating us, as He did with Abraham, to move on from primitive religion to something radically new. Primitive religion is about what we can do to reach out to the divine. True religion is about God who is all the time reaching out to us.

This what we are called to experience and treasure in life, the mountain vision that invites us simply to behold but which is sustaining even when lights are out and we are in the dark.