A Numinous Glow

Dear Friend,

For a couple of mornings this last week the big, bright “super-moon” was a beam of hope for me in the waning darkness. I stood in awe. Sister Moon seemed to be offering the gentlest of invitations…but to what? A quieter, less hectic realm? A life of peace? I’m told we’ll have to wait till 2037 for a repeat performance of this enticement.  

On the liturgical front we’ve been hearing Saint Paul’s big bright Letter to the Ephesians over the last four or five weeks and according to the calendar of readings, after this Sunday we’ll have to wait two years before again experiencing its hope-charged glow on a Sunday Mass.  

Meanwhile, it’s good to note that Paul’s invitation is quite straightforward: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.” (Eph. 5:14). Still pondering Sister Moon, maybe the phrase from this week’s reading is more apt. Writing of Christ’s love for the church Paul writes, “This is a great mystery” – and I would add, a luminous mystery, altogether lunar, this sunlight meeting moon’s terrain, a marvelous “coincidence of opposites”? It’s all wrapped up in the light and the darkness converging, man and woman, two becoming one - the Holy Infinite taking on human flesh.   

For many in this week’s Gospel, the words of Jesus are simply too much. Many walk away from a promise too good to be true, or too unsettling. Peter, though, has nowhere else to go. The living Word has captivated him. It was not about “miracles done and delivered” by Jesus; it was, in the words of Mary McGlone, "about everything he did being a sign pointing toward what was much greater than our limited or limiting comprehension." Now there’s a numinous glow!

Gratefully,

Father Dan OFM, Pastor