A Lectio Divina Approach to the Sunday Liturgy
BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD (Series 8, n. 14)
2nd Sunday of Lent, Year C – February 28, 2010 *
“The Gift of Transformation”
BIBLE READINGS
Gn 15:5-12, 17-18 // Phil 3:17-4:1 // Lk 9:28b-36
(N.B. Series 8 of BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD: A LECTIO DIVINA APPROACH TO THE SUNDAY LITURGY includes a prayerful study of the Sunday liturgy of Year C from the perspective of the Second Reading. For reflections on the Sunday liturgy of Year C based on the Gospel reading, please scroll up to the “ARCHIVES” above and open Series 2. For reflections based on the Old Testament reading, open Series 5.)
I. BIBLICO-LITURGICAL REFLECTIONS
Lent is a journey of spiritual transformation. This season of grace helps us to respond to God’s gift of transformation and to our vocation to glory. In the Old Testament reading (Gn 15:5-12), we hear one significant moment in Abraham’s journey of faith: God’s ratification of a covenant that would transform Abraham from an obscure Mesopotamian sheik into a venerable father of the nation, while confirming his promise of land for Abraham’s descendants.
The Gospel reading (Lk 9:28b-36) presents the event of the Lord’s transfiguration on a mountain, wherein Peter, James and John had a glimpse of Jesus’ divine glory. The divine vision would strengthen the disciples in their journey of transformation and their call to total participation in Christ’s paschal mystery. Jesus - resplendent with inner glory - was revealed, not only as the perfect lawgiver and the ultimate prophet, but as the Son of God into whose image we are being transformed.
The Second Reading (Phil 3:17-4:1) helps us to delve into our own vocation of transformation. The Christian journey of transformation is radically initiated at baptism, but needs to be perfected day by day, until the end time when “Christ will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body”. Saint Paul, responding so fully to the gift of baptismal transformation that he could truthfully confess: “It is no longer I who live; Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20), presents himself as an “imitator of Christ” – a model to be emulated by the pledging Philippians. Paul’s journey of configuration to Christ was not without difficulties and sacrifice. But remaining steadfast in his faith, he exhorted the Philippians to stand firm in the Lord.
The biblical scholar Adrian Nocent comments: “In the second reading, Saint Paul develops the thought that all who are baptized will share in the glory of the transfigured Christ. He urges the Philippians to follow his own example and not let their hearts become attached to earthly things. They are already citizens of heaven. How, then, could they glory in what is really a cause for shame or make anything earthly the goal of their life? The Christian is constantly confronted with choices he cannot evade. He must choose, and he must keep on choosing, since, though already a citizen of heaven, he still lives in that form of a servant which Christ himself assumed and in which he was humbled even to the point of dying (Phil 2:6-11). But the day of the Lord’s return will be the day when his fidelity will be rewarded: he will be transformed and become like the glorious Christ. This then, is the lesson of the Second Sunday of Lent as it seeks to bring about our conversion. We must change our ways, we must choose and follow the Apostle, that is, in the last analysis we must follow Christ on his paschal journey so that with him we may finally be transformed and glorified.”
In this Lenten season, we present with joy an extremely inspiring profile of Jean Vanier, a modern-day example of a full response to the divine “gift of transformation”. Vanier’s participation in Christ’s paschal mystery is transformed into a “gift for living” in a world assailed by the culture of death - where the handicapped and the weak are faced with rejection (cf. “Jean Vanier’s Gift for Living” by Carolyn Whitney-Brown in AMERICA, December 22-29, 2008, p. 22).
In August 1964, Jean Vanier was a 36-year-old former naval officer seeking to follow Jesus and the Gospels in a new way. He invited two men who had been living in an institution for people with intellectual disabilities to share a house with him in a French village. Since then, more than 132 similar communities, called L’Arche (the Ark), have developed in over 34 countries, welcoming people of all faiths and traditions. Its related network, called Faith and Light, included more than 1,500 communities. Jean Vanier has become internationally recognized for his profound reflections on social inclusion, peace, forgiveness and what it means to be human.
A celibate spiritual leader who is not a priest, a philosopher with a doctoral degree who is not a professor, Vanier is not easily categorized. When he turned 80 in the fall, the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper commended his peacemaking, ecumenism and humanitarianism. The editorial endorsed Vanier as a worthy candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, created to honor those who have “greatly contributed to fraternity among human beings across the world”. Jean Vanier was born into a distinguished Canadian family. His family was the last of Canada’s diplomats to flee Nazi-occupied France when he was 11. At age 13, Vanier decided to join the British Navy and again crossed the dangerous North Atlantic. In his early 20s, after reading Thomas Merton, getting to know Daniel Berrigan, S.J., visiting Friendship House and the Catholic Worker in New York City, and completing a 30-day Ignatian retreat, Vanier resigned from the Navy. For the next 14 years, he studied and prayed, became leader of an innovative community of international students near Paris, wrote a well-received doctoral thesis on Aristotle’s understanding of happiness and was invited to teach at the University of Toronto.
In 1964 his long search to follow Jesus came into focus in a new way, when with Philippe Seux and Raphael Simi, he moved into a small house in Trosly, France. Within a year the community had grown, because Vanier was asked to take on the directorship of a local institution. A trip to India in 1969 deepened Vanier’s understanding of the spirituality and vision of Gandhi and expanded his critical understanding of poverty and community. Around that time L’Arche communities began to grow rapidly around the world, including 16 in the United States. If Vanier has any tendency to romanticize handicaps or spiritualize weakness, that changed when he himself became weak and dependent from a prolonged tropical infection in 1976 and endured a long recovery. He wrote to friends, “After twelve years at L’Arche as an assistant, I am now experiencing what it is like to be on the other side.”
His self-understanding deepened in 1980, when he spent a year living with people with more severe handicaps, whose pain touched his own anguish and even hatred. In learning to recognize his own hidden places of pain, Varnier learned to befriend weakness not just in others but in himself. “Let’s stop running away from ourselves and from the deepest part of our beings,” he encouraged people on retreat. “Let us simply stop and start listening to our own hearts. There we will touch a lot of pain. We will possibly touch a lot of anger. We will possibly touch a lot of loneliness and anguish. Then we will hear something deeper. We will hear the voice of Jesus; we will hear the voice of God: I love you. You are precious to my eyes and I love you “
For Vanier, movements inward and outward follow naturally like tides. He learned not to be an enemy of his inner contradictions and pain and began to speak more about “the teaching of Jesus that, if it had been followed, would have changed the history of the world – Love your enemies.” Love is about coming out from behind barriers, he observed. “Do we want to win, or do we want to be in solidarity with others?” he asked a Harvard audience in 1988.
After September 11, 2001, Varnier participated in gatherings where people reaffirmed their vision of mutual acceptance, but he found that those evenings of prayer left him uneasy. “I felt as though people were not praying for a new just order between people and nations, but, motivated by fear, were praying to keep the status quo – no change, no insecurity …” In words that sound especially resonant now as the economy dominates headlines, Varnier wrote that perhaps “certitudes will crumble, and stock exchanges will wobble again before more of us truly begin to search for new ways of living.” Varnier’s life offers one example of a new way of living. For him, life’s work is not simply internal growth or accepting one’s humanness. We each have something to offer. “The fundamental principle of peace is a belief that each person is important,” writes Vanier. “Even if you cannot speak, even if you cannot walk, even if you’ve been abandoned, you have a gift to give.”
II. POINTS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE HEART
Do we believe in the God of the covenant who calls us to a glorious destiny? Like Abraham do we put our faith in God?
Do we contemplate the personal significance of the Lord’s transfiguration and the strength it gives as we endeavor to participate fully in Christ’s paschal mystery? Do we allow ourselves to be transfigured in Christ and by Christ?
How do we respond to the gift of baptismal transformation? Does our life witnessing catalyze the Christian transformation of others?
III. PRAYING WITH THE WORD
Leader: Loving Father,
you are the God of the covenant.
Like Abraham, the “father if nations”,
we put our trust in you.
Assist us in our Lenten journey
and fill us with the faith that transforms.
At baptism,
our journey of “christification” was radically initiated.
Transform us more deeply,
as we go through the daily paschal events of life,
into the image of your Servant-Son Jesus Christ.
Help us to live our baptismal consecration to the full.
We regard, with humility and great esteem,
Saint Paul and others
who were true “imitators of Christ”.
Let the grace of transformation we have received
be turned into a “gift for living” for others.
May our transformation be complete.
Let it be a sign that our commonwealth is in heaven.
We believe, loving Father,
that at the end time
Jesus Christ will change our mortal bodies
and make them like his own glorious body,
by that power by which he rules all things, now and forever.
Assembly: Amen.
IV. INTERIORIZATION OF THE WORD
The following is the bread of the living Word that will nourish us throughout the week. Please memorize it.
“He will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body.” (Phil 3:21)
V. TOWARDS LIFE TRANSFORMATION
ACTION PLAN: Through your work of active charity for the weak, the handicapped and the vulnerable, allow the grace of transformation to become a “gift of living” for others. Be attentive to the various signs of the Lord’s transfiguration in your life and all around you.
ACTION PLAN: That we may truly be a sign of the Lord’s transfiguration in today’s world, make an effort to spend an hour in Eucharistic Adoration. Visit the PDDM WEB site (www.pddm.us) for the EUCHARISTIC ADORATION THROUGH THE LITURGICAL YEAR: A Weekly Pastoral Tool (Year C, vol. 6, # 14).
Prepared by Sr. Mary Margaret Tapang PDDM
PIAE DISCIPULAE DIVINI MAGISTRI
SISTER DISCIPLES OF THE DIVINE MASTER
60 Sunset Ave., Staten Island, NY 10314
Tel. (718) 494-8597 // (718) 761-2323
Website: WWW.PDDM.US