Each year on the Second Sunday of Lent, the Church offers an account of the Transfiguration for our reflection. On the mountain, Peter, James and John experience the divine glory that is Jesus’ as the beloved Son of the Father. For perhaps the first time, they catch a glimpse of Jesus’ true identity: the Son of God and the son of Mary, fully divine and fully human.
Just as the Transfiguration revealed the full identity of Jesus, Lent calls every Christian to consider the question “who am I?” seriously.
Thomas Merton expressed it this way:
If you want to identify me ask not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person. The better the answer he has, the more of a person he is. (sic)
Merton continues, reminding us that the process of realizing one’s true identity, becoming “who I really am” is the effort of a life time:
… I am all the time trying to make out the answer as I go on living. I live out the answer to my two questions myself and the answer may not be complete, even when my life is ended I may go on working out the answer for a long time after my death, but at last it will be resolved, and there will be no further question, for with God’s mercy I shall possess not only the answer but the reality that the answer was about. (Thomas Merton, My Argument with the Gestapo)
What are you living for?
What is keeping you from living fully for the thing you want to live for?
Lent, Identity, Transfiguration
Each year on the Second Sunday of Lent, the Church offers an account of the Transfiguration for our reflection. On the mountain, Peter, James and John experience the divine glory that is Jesus’ as the beloved Son of the Father. For perhaps the first time, they catch a glimpse of Jesus’ true identity: the Son of God and the son of Mary, fully divine and fully human.
Just as the Transfiguration revealed the full identity of Jesus, Lent calls every Christian to consider the question “who am I?” seriously.
Thomas Merton expressed it this way:
If you want to identify me ask not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person. The better the answer he has, the more of a person he is. (sic)
Merton continues, reminding us that the process of realizing one’s true identity, becoming “who I really am” is the effort of a life time:
… I am all the time trying to make out the answer as I go on living. I live out the answer to my two questions myself and the answer may not be complete, even when my life is ended I may go on working out the answer for a long time after my death, but at last it will be resolved, and there will be no further question, for with God’s mercy I shall possess not only the answer but the reality that the answer was about. (Thomas Merton, My Argument with the Gestapo)
What are you living for?
What is keeping you from living fully for the thing you want to live for?