Up the Mountain

Lent Day 20 - Up to the Mountain

In the account of the Transfiguration, we hear that Jesus took Peter, James, and John with him "up the mountain to pray." Mountains are standard Biblical places of encounter with God. The higher you go, the closer you come to Yahweh, who resided in the sky. We don't have to literalize this but should unpack its symbolic sense. In order to commune with God, you have to step out of your everyday, workaday world. The mountain symbolizes transcendence, otherness, the realm of God. This means that when people say, "I pray on the go" or "my work is my prayer," they're not really speaking as people of prayer. You need to go higher or beyond your normal world. Your mountain might be church, a special room in your house, the car, a corner of the natural world. But it has to be someplace where you have stepped out of your ordinary business. Today, choose to go "up to the mountain to pray" in order to meet God in the higher place. Fr. Robert Barron