“Jesus took Peter, John, and James and went up the mountain to pray”(Luke 9:28). He looked back and locked eyes with you. He motions for you too to follow him up to pray. Obedient and excited to be called you follow the Lord. You reach a plateau with your companions. Jesus asks you to pray to the Father as he instructed you. He then sets apart, kneels down and prays. You find a corner between two boulders and recline; fold your hands, and talk to God. What does He say?

Amazing things can happen in prayer. Perhaps that is one of the juxtapositions between last week’s Gospel when Jesus was prayerfully retreating in the desert and tempted by Satan and this week when on the mountaintop, “His face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white”( Luke 9:29). God’s glory is revealed in prayer as is His will through counsel of the elders.

Jesus invites us to the mountain top for a reason; to receive His consolation and insight. Once received we are called back down to daily life and live what he taught us in that brief moment. As Benedict XVI recalled in the angelus, “prayer does not mean isolating oneself from the world and from its contradictions, as Peter wanted to do on Mount Tabor; rather, prayer leads back to the journey and to action. The Christian life…consists in continuously scaling the mountain to meet God and then coming back down, bearing the love and strength drawn from him, so as to serve our brothers and sisters with God’s own love.”

Let us find time to encounter God in prayer, allow Him to transfigure us, and then live it out in our daily lives.

(cf Luke 9:28-36)