‘Lord Jesus Christ, our Saviour and Redeemer, I kneel before your blessed cross. I want to open my spirit and my heart to contemplate your holy sufferings. I want to place your cross before my poor soul that I might know it a little better, that I might receive more deeply into my heart all that you did and suffered and that I might realise who it was for whom you suffered. May your grace be with me, the grace to shake off the coldness and indifference of my heart, to forget my everyday life for at least this time of prayer with you and to dwell with you in love, sorrow and gratitude. King of all hearts, may your crucified love embrace my poor, weak, tired and discouraged heart. Fill my heart with an interior awareness of you. Stir up in me what I need so badly: compassion for you, love for you, honesty and fidelity, and perseverance in the contemplation of your holy sufferings and death.’
Karl Rahner SJ
'God places us in the world as his fellow workers-agents of transfiguration. We work with God so that injustice is transfigured into justice, so there will be more compassion and caring, that there will be more laughter and joy, that there will be more togetherness in God's world'.
Desmond Tutu
'The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can't stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief. Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguration of suffering into endurance, and of endurance into character, and of character into hope--and the hope that has become our joy does not (as happiness must for those who depend up on it) disappoint us'.
Walter Wangerin
'I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being'.
Carl Jung
'The episode of the Lord’s transfiguration challenges interpretations of Jesus of Nazareth as only another religious guru, moral exemplar or super-saint. The transfiguration is about the revelation of Jesus’ divine identity and that divinity shining out from his humanity in a way that became visible to Peter, James and John. The transfiguration of Jesus shows us that humanity and divinity belong together and how one penetrates the other. For us, who are gifted with the divine life through faith and baptism, it is a mystery of Christ’s life in which we participate as the Spirit within us aligns our humanity us ever more to himself.
Fr Billy Swan
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