Last Sunday was Palm Sunday, and the Youth of Sacred Heart Parish got to go to Good Shepherd Parish in Camp Hill to have Mass with the Bishop as well as a time of Adoration and food. Now at first, I came back thinking to myself that this was a fairly disappointing trip. It just wasn’t the same as Fan the Fire, Steubenville, and retreats like that. However when I thought about it some more, I realized that that the problem did not lie with the event, but the problem was with myself. Let’s use the story of the transfiguration to help explain this.

The story of the transfiguration happens towards the end of each gospel, where for the better part of three years the apostles had been following Jesus around and seeing him do awesome things, then before the transfiguration happened, Jesus hiked up a mountain with three of his apostles. This would not have been a simple two minute walk…because it was a mountain. So Jesus and these three apostles had some intimate time to walk, talk, and reflect on their time together. So after all that when the transfiguration happened, it was a big deal because of the relationship they had built with Jesus over time. That is the key point, is that they had been building this relationship with Jesus over time and that is what helped make the transfiguration so great!

So when I look at myself, Fan the Fire, Steubenville, and Palm Sunday are all meant to serve as mini transfigurations in my life. Times when God reveals himself to me in a powerful way. However, the ability of these events to do this is contingent upon what my prayer life has been like up to that point. If I pray daily, attend Mass, and follow Jesus day to day just as the apostles did prior to the transfiguration, then these retreats can easily build me up to an amazing experience. However if my prayer life is lacking then this would be akin to the first verses of the gospel being Jesus calls his disciples, takes them up the mountain and does the transfiguration. It would not have nearly the same effect.  

So me being unsure about the Palm Sunday event is in many ways a  wakeup call to remind myself to dive deeper into prayer, to build a closer relationship with God so that the next retreat, can be another amazing transfiguration in my life.