The season of Lent is indeed a spiritual season. It puts before us the three spiritual disciplines that will help us to respond to the call of repentance and prepare us for the renewal of faith.
The three spiritual disciplines are prayer, penance and almsgiving. Practically speaking, all the three spiritual disciplines are “do-able”, i.e. they can be done. The question is the level of difficulty in each of them.
Let us look at “almsgiving”. This weekend, the “Charities Week” envelopes are distributed to us to help us respond to the call of almsgiving.
There are a couple of things that we can do with these envelopes. We can leave it at the pews. Or we can put in some money and drop it immediately into one of the donation boxes and then forget about it.
Or we can bring it home and leave it lying around and slowly let it disappear from our sight and from our conscience.
Or we can look at it and think about it and count our blessings, in the sense that we have to honestly ask ourselves how much God has blessed us with, either materially or financially.
Will we consider the Old Testament practice of offering back to God one-tenth of what we have received from Him?
So the “Charities Week” envelope is not a piece of paper for us to put in some money. It is for us to do some thinking and to do some generous giving.
When it comes to penance, what comes to mind especially in the season of Lent is fasting and abstinence from certain kinds of foods.
While fasting and abstinence have health benefits for the body, what do they do for the soul? Certainly, food and drink are the basic necessities of life.
But when we fast and abstain, we will come to see that as much as we want to eat till our hearts content, we only need that little to get through the day.
So it is a want versus a need. And as we fast and abstain, we will come to see that God has blessed us with enough for everyone’s need, but there will never be enough for everyone’s greed.
So fasting and abstinence are forms of prayer through which God tells us that as much as food and drink can satisfy a hungry stomach, only He can fill an empty and thirsty heart.
In the gospel, we heard that Jesus brought Peter, James and John up the mountain not for any other purpose but to pray.
And for Peter, James and John, praying on that mountain was no ecstasy. In fact, they were sleepy.
And that too is our experience. And we even beat the 3 apostles in some areas of prayer. Besides being sleepy during prayer, we get distracted with our gadgets, we speed up our prayer so that we say what we need to say quickly, we skip our prayers although we won’t skip our meals.
Yet, in the presence of those three sleepy-heads, something wonderful happened. As Jesus prayed, the aspect of His face was changed and His clothes became brilliant as lightning.
This event is called the Transfiguration, and it is important enough that the three gospels have recorded it and in Singapore there is also a church named after it.
Essentially, the Transfiguration is a revelation. The Transfiguration reveals Jesus in His glory, His glory that is hidden in the ordinary.
The Transfiguration also reveals the identity of Jesus as the Son of God, the Chosen One, the one who we must listen to.
So as we listen to the account of the Transfiguration, what does God wants to reveal to us?
One thing for sure is that God reveals to us in the ordinary things and events of our lives. So with the Lenten spiritual disciplines of prayer, penance and almsgiving, they reveal to us who we are and also who God is in our lives.
Besides those three spiritual disciplines, the ordinary things of life can also reveal to us who God is in the ordinary people around us.
A man was late for Mass and he hurried to church and got to his pew just in time for the opening prayer. But as he bowed his head, he noticed the shoe of the old man next to him touching his own shoe. He sighed to himself, “So much room. WHY must he let his dirty shoe touch mine?”
This bothered the man greatly but it didn’t seem to bother the old man at all.
He tried to pay attention to the Mass but his thoughts kept going to the old man’s dirty shoes that were touching his nice looking shoes.
The old man sang the hymns loudly, but the man with the nice shoes was irritated. He grumbled to himself, “Wear dirty shoes still want to sing so loud.”
After Mass, the man wanted to have a word with the old man about entering the church in his dirty shoes. He tried to be polite so he began with, “Hi, how are you?”
The old man’s face brightened up and he said, “You know, I have been coming here for a few months already and you are the first to say “Hi” to me. The old man continued, “I know that my appearance is not like all the rest of you, but I really do try to always look my best. I try to look my best and clean my shoes before I come to church, but my long walk to church made my clothes wet with sweat and my shoes become dirty and dusty.”
When the man heard this, he could only bow his head and look at the old man’s dirty shoes. And the old man continued, “I am sorry if my dirty shoes touched your nice shoes. I am sorry.”
The man managed to say, “Oh please don’t say sorry. Your shoes are not that dirty.” And he said silently to himself, “My heart is dirtier …”
Well, ordinary shoes, maybe a bit dirty, but through it God makes a revelation and a heart receives a transfiguration.
So as we continue climbing the mountain of Lent, let us look for the signs of revelation from God. It is in those revelations that our hearts will receive a transfiguration.