On the Road to Life
Second Sunday of Lent. Fr Dominic White is inspired by his memories of a Dominican nun.
What might a holy person look like? Some years ago, when I was first ordained and working in the parish of the Rosary Shrine in London, one Sunday afternoon Fr Dermot, who was then the Prior, took me to visit a Dominican contemplative nun. Sr Mary Raymond was someone I knew a lot about but had never met. She was a schoolfriend of my godmother’s, and answered the call to the Dominican contemplative life at an early age, joining the enclosed community at Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight. She had often prayed for my family in times of need, and had such an extraordinary gift for intercession that she was known as ‘The Nuclear Option’. In 1988 the Carisbrooke monastery closed, and she and some of the other nuns were given a home by our Dominican Sisters in Bushey, near London. When I finally got to meet her, she was in hospital, and didn’t have long to live. She was in Intensive Care and the nurse warned us she could only manage ten minutes with us. She brought us in and there was Sr Mary Raymond sitting in bed, surrounded by tubes and machines, and immediately identifiable by her Dominican veil.
I don’t remember what she said to us. But I will never forget her warmth, and above all the radiance of her face. Many years later, reading the great poet and Doctor of the Church, St Ephrem the Syrian, on how in the Resurrection we will be radiant, ‘the spirit manifested in the soul and the soul in the body,’ I realised this wasn’t just a mental image or metaphor. Rather, it was something physical. For we are embodied beings. In every culture and epoch we have found this reality of being human very difficult. Either we have tried to escape into mental fantasy, or else tried to silence the yearnings of the soul by living a purely material life. Neither will make us happy. The root of this problem is the Fall. This origin story of the mystery of sin reveals a multiple breakdown in relationship: between man and woman, humankind and God, humankind and creation – and between body and soul: ‘I was afraid because I was naked, and so I hid’ (Gen. 3:10). For the first time Adam looked at himself from outside, as if his soul was someone different from his body.
In Lent we are on a graced journey of return to God and to our true nature. Starting with Ash Wednesday, the journey of repentance was marked visibly on our foreheads, where the spiritual and creative part of our brain is located. We commit to prayer, fasting and almsgiving, all of which involve practical, embodied doing, for God, ourselves and our neighbour, as individuals and communities. The danger, of course – given the fallen reality of our distance from God – is that we turn it into an endurance exercise. And when it becomes a battle – when we feel the broken relationship of spirit, soul and body within us – we blame ourselves or give up. Ten days into Lent we may well be finding ourselves at that point now! So the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus is a sign of God’s grace and hope for us. In the presence of Peter, James and John, his closest friends – and therefore with us, His brothers and sisters by adoption – Jesus is transformed on the mountain. His spirit is manifested in His soul and His soul in His body. He is dazzlingly radiant. As He will be in His Resurrection, and we will be. This is what the way of the Cross, the way of self-denial, is all about. Like Abram, we are called by God to leave what is familiar, all our often negative assumptions about who we are and what we should do – to walk instead by the way of faith, and to be fruitful beyond what we could imagine. Often not all at once, but when he we are old, towards the completion of our journey.
With Jesus on the mountain too are Moses (representing the Law) and Elijah (the prophets). This shows that Jesus is both the fulfilment of the Jewish Scriptures, the Old Testament, all of which points to the Messiah, and the fulfilment of the new Law of Love and the Bible’s teaching of conversion of heart. And we see in Jesus what we are becoming. Yes, we will suffer, and die, as Sr Mary Raymond did a few weeks after I met her – but our destination, the whole purpose of this, is our transformation into risen life. As the secret harmonies of grace work in us during Lent – which we may experience more as discord, as the discovery of unknown weaknesses and sins that bring us to the confession, the Sacrament of Reconciliation. But that journey from discord is the journey to harmony in all great music – we may be surprised how, in a small act of charity, in the way we look at someone, reflecting back to them the image and likeness of God which they are, we become the presence of God’s light for them in a dark and uncertain world. All the time, God has been working secretly within us, binding back into right relationship spirit, soul and body, self and neighbour, ourselves with God. For we look forward not just to some mythical future of pie in the sky, but even now, in these moments of grace, we share in the radiance of the Risen Life. Like Peter, James and John, we will need to come down the mountain and attend to the needs around us. But the memory of grace is with us. We are on the road to Life.
Readings: Genesis 12:1-4 | 2 Timothy 1:8-10 | Matthew 17:1-9
