¶ The Transfiguration and Divine Love
Welcome to Slaking Thirst, a podcast that's all about bringing the thirst deep within our hearts for love and communion to the heart of Christ, a divine heart, who is seeking our love and communion in return. The hope is that the two thirsts would meet and both thirsts would be slaked. As we hear in the gospel today, it's the feast day of the transfiguration and...
What we see here is something rather remarkable, which is to say the glory of Jesus, the beauty of his divinity, is shining forth in his very human body. And so the glory of God, the beauty of God, of course, is his love. And so we see divine love kind of being manifest through his body in a very unique way.
which has several implications for it, as you can imagine. One of them is what happens to Jesus is meant to happen to us, his mystical body. So we're meant to see this and give our hearts permission to desire and hope. That each one of us could be shining with that kind of glory. That's not naive or presumptuous to actually why he's doing it. So he goes first to see what we will become. So that's the first kind of...
¶ Reappropriating Our Relationship with the Body
kind of import from seeing this revelation. But one of them maybe perhaps for us on a human level is to kind of reappropriate our own relationship with the human body. Oftentimes, spirituality sounds something like this. God is pure spirit. I am a mix of physical and spiritual. So if I can systematically minimize the physical...
and maximize the spiritual, then I would be closer to God. And it sounds wonderfully rational and logical, except for the tricky thing called Jesus, who of course comes to us in and through a human body. speaking to us with human lips and vocal cords, his words resonating in our eardrums. He touches people with his hands. He puts mud in their eyes, spit lands on their tongue. He groans, he sweats, he bleeds.
He naps, he sleeps, he eats, he walks. He has a mom and a dad. He has a thing called a hometown. He really is revealing God in and through the most concrete realities. And so it invites us as followers of this unique religion. where our God becomes flesh, to reappropriate our own experience with our bodies. And so maybe two things to kind of enter into our own experience can help.
The first one is right now as I'm speaking to you, what is your felt sense of church right now? Not what are you thinking about, but what does it feel like to be in the church this morning? To hear these words and celebrate it. Are you kind of restless? You have something going on today? Are you just really enjoying being here? Does it just feel very good and grounding and peaceful?
Are you full of delight and joy? Do you feel excess amounts of energy going through your body? Are you super sluggish? Take a minute and just check in. What's it like to be you here at Mass this morning? And then the second question is, how aware are you and how in touch are you with that sensation? Most of us live pretty distracted.
lives and so this felt sense of reality which is comes to us through our bodies we kind of ignore we're not even aware of sure we wish we were feeling not as tired always okay but it's like We go, yeah, I'm tired again. Okay, and we move right along. And it's like, well, that's one experience of your embodiedness. What does it feel like to be you, to come to Mass, to show up at Mass, to sit in the pew you're in?
¶ Embracing Embodiment in Faith
On this morning. Not yesterday, but today. A second way to kind of enter into your own relationship with your embodiedness is a question I remember I was given years ago to pray with. And it was really powerful. What part of your body do you dislike? Don't say it out loud. It's mass. What part of your body do you dislike? And where does that dislike come from? Who told you the judgment you hold on your body?
And what might Jesus want to say to you about that part of your body? And don't presume, oh, he's going to say I'm just lovely the way I am. You don't know what he's going to say. You haven't talked to him about it yet. I guarantee it. It's a really remarkable thing that there's all parts of our own existence that we judge, we condemn, we label. This is bad. This means this. And all of that comes from things we've learned along the way.
but I would guess it doesn't come from the God who made you. And so here we are carrying judgments and beliefs about our own embodiedness that aren't in communion with Jesus. And we have a religion where on today's feast day, God shines forth through a human body. And at the high point of our worship, the holiest thing we could ever do, the most powerful thing that could ever happen to your body, is that the body of Christ the Eucharist enters into your body.
And then you're renewed to become the body of Christ in the world. And then we use things with unqualified ways like, well, I got to go be spiritual. I'm going to have my spiritual life. Now, properly understood, that's the right phrase. But for us, it usually means I can ignore all this stuff. My body that has aches and pains and soreness and is...
not what it used to be, or blah, blah, blah, blah. All of that is wrapped up in your felt experience of who you are, which means it's wrapped up into your relationship with Jesus, or at least it's invited to be. especially on the feast day, like the transfiguration. So perhaps today, one of the things we can do to honor the divine light shining through the human body of Jesus
is throughout the day just to stop and take a sense of what does it feel like to be me right now? What's my felt sense in this room, in this car, in this restaurant, in this grocery store, wherever we're at? And just connect with that and then bring that into our relationship with God. To listen to more homilies, talks, and reflections from Father Ryan and Father Patrick. please check out slakingthirst.com and consider becoming a subscriber to the Slaking Thirst YouTube channel.