Today the Church turns her gaze towards the transfigured face of Our Beloved Lord. His face shone like the sun, says the Gospel. It’s hard to look at the sun, or rather it is not possible without damage to the eye. Our Lord’s face shines like the sun because the human soul cannot penetrate into the divinity: God remains ever inaccessible to our gaze. And that is precisely why God became man, so that, thanks to the human face of God, we could get a glimpse of the inner life of the Blessed Trinity that we will see in eternity if we prove ourselves worthy by a holy life.
As we turn our eyes to Jesus on this glorious feast, let us ask Him for the grace to be ever enthralled by His beauty, for He is, as psalm 44 tells us, the “most beautiful of the sons of men”, He is “beautiful and attractive” as we read in the meditation on the two standards; He is someone you want to be with and to get to know better. Let’s allow ourselves to be drawn ever more into the “secret of that face”, “in abscondito faciei” as we read on psalm 30.
Through perseverance in prayer, through the lasting effort at lifting up our eyes to our Lord Jesus Christ, we will find ourselves more and more led into the secrets of that Face, the secrets that lie beyond that Face, those ineffable secrets that will be revealed in the glory of the eternal homeland, and that we are blessed to catch a glimpse of in this life, if, and only if, we make the effort each day to detach ourselves from the attraction of the creature that fades, and turn towards the eternal light that abides. Then, and only then, can we ourselves become the “light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn and the day star arise” (2 Pt 1:19).
