"Meditating on this passage of the Gospel (Luke 9:28B-36), we
can take from it a very important teaching. First of all, there is the primacy
of prayer, without which all of the work of the apostolate and charity is
reduced to activism. During Lent we learn to give the right amount of time to
both personal and communal prayer, which gives breath to our spiritual life.
Moreover, to pray is not to isolate oneself from the world and its
contradictions, as Peter wished to do on Tabor. Prayer, rather, leads us back
to the journey, to action. 'The Christian life,' I wrote in my Message for this Lent, 'consists in continuously scaling the mountain to meet God and then
coming back down, bearing the love and strength drawn from him, so as to serve
our brothers and sisters with God’s own love' (n. 3).
"Dear brothers and sisters, I hear this Word of God addressed
to me in a special way during this moment of my life. Thank you! The Lord is
calling me to 'scale the mountain,' to dedicate myself still more to prayer and
to meditation. But this does not mean abandoning the Church – on the contrary,
if God asks this of me, it is to serve the Church with the same dedication and
the same love with which I have tried to do so hitherto, but in a way that is
more adapted to my age and my strength. Let us invoke the intercession of the Virgin
Mary: may she help us always to follow the Lord Jesus in prayer and in active
charity."
~Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus Message of 2/24/13
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