Monastery of the Transfiguration
Ellwood City, Pennsylvania
August 6, 2023
I greet all of you who have gathered as pilgrims to celebrate the great feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord here in this sacred place. I am grateful to Mother Christophora and the sisterhood of the Holy Transfiguration monastery for welcoming me and all of the pilgrims present today for the celebration of their altar feast. It has been a blessing to serve with [have present with us] His Eminence Archbishop Melchisedek of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania as well as all the clergy who have gathered from near and far.
In today’s homily I spoke of our potential as human beings, of our calling in Christ, not only to perceive the divine light of Tabor, but to be suffused with that light. The Transfiguration which we celebrate today is our longed-for destination, our hoped-for destiny, the eternal reality toward which we strive.
However, the Transfiguration is not just our future; it is our present.
According to Saints Ignatius and Callistus, following the venerable Mark the Monk, at the time of our baptism, we already received the fullness of the grace of God, the fullness of enlightenment. Since that time, we have covered over the garment of light that we then received with our daily sins, our habitual indulgence in the passions. Rather than filling our life with what those hesychast fathers call the three foundations of every virtue—love, peace, and the constant remembrance of the Name of the Lord—we have filled our lives with pettiness and trivialities.
Through repentance and practice of the virtues, however, we can recover the grace that God has already given us. Chipping away at the hardened muck of habitual sin, we may slowly reveal the light that is already within us, so that both we and the world can benefit from that light.
But even this effort, which we might call asceticism, self-denial for the sake of God and neighbor, is not our own. As Mother Alexandra, the foundress of this monastery, makes so abundantly clear in her meditations on the Lord’s Prayer, we have nothing to offer that was not given to us by God. By his original gift of grace, we recover the original gift of grace; by virtue of what he has already given us, we open up ourselves to receive the gift that is already within.
It is my hope that this pilgrimage has been an opportunity for all of us to share our little light with one another, so that we are all inspired, monastics and pilgrims alike, to redouble our own efforts to recover that light and to share that light with the world.
For, as Saints Ignatius and Callistus, Mark the Monk and Mother Alexandra, have all explained, wherever there is any true light, anything truly good, it is not of us, but of God. He is the light of the world, the light in us all, the light in which—in whom—we shall see light.
May his light shine more brightly for each of us and in each of us, illumining our lives with love and peace, filling all things with the glory of his holy Name.
Once again, my thanks and blessing to the sisterhood of the Monastery of the Transfiguration for their hospitality, my sincere congratulations on the celebration of their 55th anniversary as a sacred place of prayer and a source of light, and my greetings and blessing to all the pilgrims who have gathered here to receive the fruit of those prayers and the blessings of that light.