Christian Meditation
This website is the research and writing of Father Ian VanHeusen, a Catholic Priest of the Diocese of Raleigh, NC. Current assignments are ECU Newman and St. Peter’s in Greenville. Our mission is to provide content and events that motivate people to cultivate the interior life necessary to live as a disciple of Jesus Christ. This website follows the prayer tradition of the Catholic Church in communion with the Pope, the College of Bishops, and Body of Christ whom we desire to serve with fidelity and obedience.
Discovering the Light of Mt. Tabor
In assuming a human nature, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ, took our frail human condition and brought it into communion with His Divinity. He did this so that we might “become partakers of the Divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). St. Athanasius expressed this when the stated that “the Son of God became man, so that man might become God.”[1] This transformation, by which humans are brought into communion with God, is often called divinization or deification.
Early Christians often looked to the Transfiguration as a source of inspiration for understanding the goal of Christian living. They saw all of creation being transformed and elevated through the salvific actions of Jesus Christ so that it might radiate the light of Christ. Thus the divinization of the human person was also understood as the transfiguration of the human person through grace.
Prayer is the essential link by which Christians learn to discover the light of Christ which dwells within. Each Christian possesses this Divine light by virtue of the grace given in Baptism. The height of all prayer, its source and summit, is the liturgy. In the Eucharistic celebration, our hearts are attuned to the Divine light, and, through sanctifying grace, transfigured so that we might manifest God to the world.
Through faith, hope, and love let us cultivate the inner stillness necessary to discover this light radiating in our lives. Let us dare to be saints!
[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 460