Throughout the Lenten season, we’ll be posting reflections for holy days and Sundays. These reflections are taken from this year’s Lenten reflection booklet, Return to me with all your heart which includes all-new reflections written by Ralph McCloud, and from previous Lenten reflection booklets, like the one below, written by the late Bishop Ken Untener in 1995 for that year’s Lenten booklet, “The Spiral Journey.” Click here to see all reflections as they are posted as well as links to other Lenten resources on our Lent 2025 webpage.
reflection for the SECOND sunday of lent, MARCH 16, 2025
by Bishop Kenneth Untener
Bishop of Saginaw, Michigan, 1980-2004
originally published in 1995
Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18 | Philippians 3:17-4:1 | Luke 9:28b-36
Scars of violence
“While he was praying, his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white.” When Jesus comes down from the mountain, he announces his coming passion, and his disciples do not accept it. Suffering is no the way to life for them. Not yet.
And when the passion begins on the Mount of Olives, it is not the way for them. Not yet.
When I was in high school, a teacher gave us this quote from [an Irish] author and asked us what it meant: “As a lighted candle in a holy place is the beauty of an aged face.” I thought it beautiful enough to remember, but I didn’t believe it. A candle giving its soft light into the darkness around was easy enough, but I didn’t believe the other half about the inherent beauty of an aged face.
There are beautiful, peaceful, old faces, but there are also embittered old faces. We limn the lines in our faces through our response to life. Life will teach us if we let it, but we have to let it. Beauty and wisdom do not just come with being old or having suffered. They are begotten along the way. Old faces show the dramatic difference between cynicism and bitterness on the one hand and wisdom and peace on the other.
We limn the lines in the face of our world as well as in our own. Two paths stand before us. Our world will be, or is being, transfigured into a beautiful, peaceful, wise old face where justice and love reign. Or it is becoming an embittered, ugly old face, full of war lines, ravages of hunger, disease, atrocities and environmental violence. We make it so, one way or the other. The face of the earth does not become beautiful simply by the passing of years.
People involved in the struggle for peace and justice must also struggle at times with personal bitterness. We are offended by the apathy of others. If only everyone would get involved, the world could change. We believe we can, together, transform the face of the world into one of greater justice, peace, and beauty. We can’t do it one by one, but we could all together. Yet there are so many who don’t join us in the struggle.
People are not so much cruel or mean, just indifferent, jaded by too many CNN reports. For those of us who are sure of what could be — so sure we can taste it — the seeming indifference of others brings a bitter taste. And we can let the bitterness limn the lines of our faces.
We must not do that. We have to have the confidence of a Catherine of Siena. The Church of that time seemed to her like a woman with face and body disfigured, abused, suffering from wounds inflicted by those who ought to have been most careful of it. Yet she loved it, and saw it still as the beloved Church of Christ which he would again make beautiful. Like her we have to believe in the message of today’s reading from Philippians, “He will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body by the power that enables him also to bring all things into subjection to himself.”
We can’t change the world or the Church alone. We can’t do it at all without God. And God doesn’t do it without us. We are privileged to do it together, always with the hopefulness of the children of God.
FOR REFLECTION:
- Bishop Untener mentions Catherine of Siena as an example of confident love that transforms. What is one thing in your life, church, family, workplace, city, environment that needs to be “loved into change”? How can you begin?
- Study two faces in your workplace, church and/or home. Reflect on how life has marked their faces.
- Invite one other person to get involved in a peace and justice action or issue with you and/or your group.
>> Join us on Monday, March 17, for the Pax Christi USA community’s weekly Lenten prayer service over Zoom. Click here for more information and to register.
>> Click here to see more resources for prayer, study and action this Lenten season.
Bishop Kenneth Untener of Saginaw, Michigan, died in 2004. He was beloved in his diocese and the wider community for his humility, deep spirituality, and dedication to those who are impoverished and marginalized.
Very wise, comparing the faces of people to the visage of Mother Earth. Both show how sadness and violence on the one hand and tender care on the other make for lines and creases in people and polluted, ruined land and water scapes in the earth. A recently growing sense that our environment is a “subject” with feeling, like a person, makes some of feel a certain empathy for our common home, our Mother Earth, whom we must treat gently, reverently as God’s home too. Indeed, some people have gone to court to affirm the dignity and protected status of certain places, some of which are sacred to Indigenous peoples. Courts are recognizing that not every piece of land or water is simply to be exploited for natural resources and commerce.
Thanks!