Lent's the season for decluttering heart, mind, and soul in order to get closer to the person we're created to be. Which makes for liberating, exciting weeks ahead.      

Has anyone been “transfigured” before your eyes—that is, has someone done or said something that in a flash changed the way you viewed them?

How do you see the world around you? “Charged with the grandeur of God,” as Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins did? Full of life, love, power, and possibility? Perhaps on rare occasions we perceive reality this way. Or maybe it only seems that way when we’ve fallen in love or won the lottery.

Somewhere in his college years Mark found himself branded with the nickname “Gramps.” I did not know him then. Years later, when we started working together and I first heard him called that name, I smiled. Somehow it seemed to me to fit him.

I always felt sorry for Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz. She tried so hard to share the wonders of her adventure, and all she got from her Auntie Em and others were bemused stares. "Sure, sure," they said. "You got bumped on the noggin and your imagination went wild."

Gathered as a people on a pilgrimage of salvation, we ask for God's blessings and pardon.

O Father, Son and Spirit Blest, with hearts transfigured by your grace, may we your matchless splendor praise and see the glory of your face.