Sermon Cloud

During the first thirty years of his priesthood, Karol Wojtyla developed a special love for young people. In the words of his biographer, George Weigel, he had always thought of adolescence as a privileged period of life, a time when genuine human personality begins to form, and the Church should be present to young lives at those crucial moments of maturation and vocation discernment.

This conviction allowed him to leave the world with one of the legacies of his papacy - the World Youth Day gatherings which still take place today. John Paul never asked a young person to do anything he had not done, or to struggle with any spiritual dilemma with which he had not wrestled; young people understood this and appreciated it. They also trusted him because of this and willingly accepted his challenge.

The pope knew that young people naturally dream big dreams, including dreams of the heroic and the dramatic, so throughout his meetings with them, he challenged them to never settle for less than the spiritual and moral grandeur of which they are capable, with the help of God's grace.* 'Don't sell yourself short,' he would tell them, 'yes, you will fail, but that's no reason to lower the bar - get up, dust yourself off, seek forgiveness and reconciliation and try again'. This is the drama of spiritual life, and every disciple of Christ, regardless of age, is living it until the day we meet Him face to face.

World Youth Day gatherings are, in a sense, experiences of the Transfiguration. Like the gospel account we hear today ( Lk 9:28-36), those who participate in the World Youth Day are quite often privy to extraordinary experiences. Like the disciples, young people respond to the call of the Lord to come away from the regular routines of life and allow the Lord to speak to their hearts, to show them what is possible when they walk in faith and to give them a glimpse of the glory He has in mind for us all.

This is, I think, one of the aims of this Lenten period for us all: to come away from the routine of life, and to allow the divine conversation between God and ourselves to be deepened. This is a time to dream dreams and to think big in terms of our faith.

All humans can have the experience of meeting God, and those who have will tell of powerful experiences and sometimes epic adventures. In the first reading today ( Gn 15:5-18), Abram encountered God, who showed him the grandeur of all the stars of the heavens, and made a covenant with him which has become a central part of our salvation history.

Those who have had the experience of meeting God, of struggling with failure, and of getting up again, seeking forgiveness and setting out again on the road, know that like the disciples on the mountaintop, we are all tempted at times to respond like Peter - 'Let us build three tents' (Lk 9:33) but to concern ourselves with earthly things when confronted with the possibility of entering into the divine conversation which was possible at the Transfiguration would have been a refusal of this precious gift. We too need to listen for the voice of God which seeks us out, meets us where we are, with all our faults and foibles, and encourages us to get up again, to dust ourselves off and to try again.

At the end of each World Youth Day, the pope calls young people to go back home, to come down from the mountain, and to share the good news of the experience of faith with those they meet. 'Continue the journey of faith that is your life,' he tells them, and we will meet again when the next Transfiguration opportunity presents itself.

Encouraged by the words of the apostle Paul who reminds us that Christ will transform all our weaknesses and conform us more and more to himself (cf Phil 3:21), we stand firm in the Lord, and continue on our way through life, drawing from the Source which gives us life, forgives our failings and calls us to demonstrate his love by the way we love one another.

*Weigel, George. God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church. (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), p. 38.