Holy Graitude

 


I love it when I bump into a quote which meant something to me, which I highlighted, a while ago and suddenly has new meaning or deeper insight. Such is what happened when I re-met this line from John O’Donohue: “When you discover something, you transfigure some the forsakenness of the world.”

Yes, and....

He makes this insightful remark after talking about discoveries at the “frontiers” and it sounds a lot like Jesus and Lent and this past wilderness year! As I/we approach anniversaries of pandemic relocations and adjustments, regrets and resolutions, and as I approach one year of writing liturgeemails!, I am enjoying some pauses and the surprising revelations which have occurred. 

Transfigure is a daunting word and one we recently struggled with on Transfiguration Sunday. There is mystery and eeriness in it. O’Donohue brings it down from the mountaintop and into clearer view, if at a frontier or margin or place we might not venture ordinarily. It seems to me that part of our mission then and now is to pour love and mercy on forsakenness, to re-member the lost and lonely. It is in the re-membering that transfiguration, change, redemption, might take place. Memory then is a form of love and attention. 

Now I am aching for the Eucharist and to “do this in remembrance of me” but finding hope in the still presence and power of memory at the margins. The divine energy of discovery! That too is holy gratitude!


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