The challenge of being God-like

     The reality of God is continually unfolding before us.  Invited into the very heart of God and embraced by his life giving love, we need to know him so that we may love him and serve him.  This process is ongoing.  The more we know him, the better we know ourselves and understand the parameters by which we are to live our lives.

     The Church today celebrates the feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus.  He took his three closest friends to the mountaintop, and was transfigured before their eyes.  They knew him as a man, a great friend and teacher, a miracle worker blessed by God, possibly even the long awaited Messiah.  Jesus knew that the immediate days ahead would challenge their perception of him, so he revealed to them the fullness of his holiness and power.  On that mountaintop, there was a blinding light, one that they could not gaze upon.  They saw beyond what was known and comfortable, beyond what was possible and survivable, they saw the glory of God ... and lived.  They saw not only power, they saw that he was the center of all that was, of all that is, and of all that would yet come to be.  In their unredeemed sinfulness they caught a glimpse of what no other man before saw since the days of Adam and Eve.

     And yet it was not in his glory and power that Jesus chose to reveal himself, but through the love and friendship, through the unexpected gentleness of his healing touch, in his willing sacrifice.  In that way he destroyed the hold that death and evil had on his creation, and restored life.  He calls us to be like him in love and compassion, in gentleness and mercy, in that relationship of friendship and peace with those entrusted to our care.  The Kingdom and the Power and the Glory belong to God, and he shares them with us in eternity.  But in our journey in the here and now he desires us to embrace his love.  In that love we find the strength and power to live our lives fully rooted in him.  In that love we find our best image of the God who calls us to be like him.

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     Today, August 6th , a little over 1,900 years later, the world saw another blinding light that exhibited power beyond our imagination.  Today marks 66 years since the first atomic bomb was used on Hiroshima in Japan and three days later on Nagasaki.  It brought a swift end to World War II.  It undoubtedly saved countless lives, for which I am grateful.  It also took the lives of about 140,000 in Hiroshima alone (mostly innocent civilians), in an instant and for many years to come in suffering and continued death.  It ushered in to atomic/nuclear age which is filled with fear even to our day.  I remember climbing under our school desks for protection and people building bomb shelters. 

     We developed the ability and proved the courage to stand against wrong with right and might.  But just because we could do it, does not mean that we should do it.  The U.S. bishops  in the pastoral letter "The Challenge of Peace" of the late 1970's said that until we repent of that action on August 6 & 9 in 1945 and acknowledge that we stepped beyond our pay grade into the realm of God, we can never truly be at peace or be peacemakers.  When he called us to be God-like, it was in love and mercy and compassion, and not power and might.  A thought.

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And finally, today marks the anniversary of the death of Pope Paul VI in 1978.

He was the first papal world traveller of modern times.

I remember him standing at the U.N. and making

an impassioned plea for peace before the world community.

"No more war ... war never again."

If only he had been heard.

May he rest in peace.