This is My Beloved Son, Listen to Him
Are you ready to spend some time with the Lord? If you are new to mental prayer, we invite you to visit our guide on how to pray to learn more.
We begin Week 2 of our Sunday Lenten Challenge with this opening prayer:
Trust And Believe
Lord,
I believe you want to give me the grace to go deeper in prayer this Lent. Help me to be present to you so that I’ll intimately pray these next 15 minutes with my heart fully open and willing to receive that grace. Please help me open my heart and pray with more intensity. I want to be able to visualize myself with you so I can feel your presence more intimately in my life this Lent. Lord, give me the grace I need as I strive to complete these 6 days of Sunday Lenten meditations. I am choosing to take up my cross and humbly follow you all the way to Calvary and I want to do it with my whole heart.
AMEN.
Listening to the Beloved Son
Let’s contemplate the promises of God this Lent. What does it mean to listen to Christ? To hear Him and know that you are following Him? Let’s meditate on these things in the presence of Christ and offer ourselves to Him in prayer.
Prayer to the Holy Spirit
Holy Spirit,
I believe you are truly here and present to me right now. I desire to be present to you.
Thank you for your loving presence, even in my darkest moments. Help me recognize your voice and give me the grace to obey it.
You are faithful to me even when I am not. Please help me listen to Jesus and follow him. Do not let me forget the price Jesus has paid for my soul.
I am grateful to you for sustaining me through every trial in my life. Please help me listen to the Beloved Son. I desire it and ask for the ability to listen in prayer.
Breathe on me as I spend these next 15 minutes fixated on today’s Mass readings. Holy Spirit, help me pray with humility, honesty, love and affection. I want to grow in virtue and holiness.
Thank you, Holy Spirit, for every consolation, desolation, time of silence, difficult trial, and temptation of the evil one. I understand that you love me and that everything in my life happens by God’s holy will, whether it be divine providence or God’s permissive will due to my sin and negligence.
Please humble me as I walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem. Help me listen to Jesus and truly love him as the Eternal Father’s beloved Son.
AMEN.
Say Nothing Just Take Him In
Spend 1-3 minutes in silence gazing at the Lord with love and gratitude, in a prayer of silent contemplation.
Make a Movie in Your Mind
Now we will contemplate the first reading. Imagine you’re standing in the dust of Haran, a caravan city humming with noise — camel bells, merchants calling out prices, tents being folded and loaded. Abram is here, an old man by now, and you watch him standing still in the middle of all that motion, listening to something you cannot hear. Then he turns to his household and starts giving orders: pack the tents, gather the flocks, we’re leaving everything we know. You watch Sarai’s face as she realizes he means it — leaving family, leaving the only home she’s ever had, walking out toward a land with no name yet, only a promise…
Listening to the Lord's Calling
Gen 12:1-4
The LORD said to Abram: Go forth from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. All the families of the earth will find blessing in you. Abram went as the LORD directed him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran.
Let us take a moment to reflect on the message in the first reading.
Abram was an old man already when the Lord asked him to uproot his family and go. Abram had great faith in God. He trusted that the Lord’s promises would come true, so he obeyed.
Be Completely Real
What is God saying to your heart right now? Have you been doubting a promise of God? Have you been struggling lately in your faith?
Give the Holy Spirit time to respond.
Be honest with the Lord. Self-reflect on your faith and whether you completely trust in his promises.
Let us continue our mental prayer with today’s Gospel:
Visualize Christ
Your legs ache. You’ve been climbing for over an hour, the ground rising steeply beneath you, Mount Tabor’s slopes thick with terebinth and oak lower down, thinning out as you near the summit. The air up here is cooler, sharper. Peter, James, and John are ahead of you, breathing hard, and Jesus leads them without a word toward the top. You reach the summit just as the light changes — not the ordinary gold of late afternoon, but something searing, white, pouring out of him now, his very clothes turned dazzling. Two figures stand beside him who were not there a moment ago…
Transfigured
Matthew 17:1-9
After six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them; his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with him.
Then Peter said to Jesus in reply, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud cast a shadow over them, then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”
When the disciples heard this, they fell prostrate and were very much afraid. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and do not be afraid.”
And when the disciples raised their eyes, they saw no one else but Jesus alone. As they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, “Do not tell the vision to anyone until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”
Let us meditate on Peter’s initial response to the Transfiguration:
“If you wish, I will make three tents here…” Peter wants to help Jesus, yet he truly doesn’t understand the moment.
It is not until the Father speaks from the cloud that the disciples realize the glory of this moment, and they fall prostrate.
Paul reminds Timothy that this glory isn’t earned by anything we’ve done — it’s a gift, planted in Christ before time began. The dazzling light the disciples witness on the mountain is the same grace Paul says has “destroyed death and brought life to light” through the Gospel.
Sometimes we think we are doing good for God when we are really not understanding the moment. It is in times like this that you have to be more fervent in your prayer life. Are you able to hear the Holy Spirit when He nudges you? Have you been able to quiet your mind so that you can listen? God’s grace flows when we are open to receiving it, just like it did for Peter and the disciples on the mountain—the moment they heard the Father’s voice, they finally understood the weight of what was happening.
Are You Listening?
Jesus, forgive me for the times I’ve tried to build tents you never asked me to build — rushing to fix, to plan, to do something, when all you wanted was for me to be still and listen.
Paul reminds us that your grace was never something we earned by staying busy for you; it was given to us “before time began,” a gift planted in Christ long before we ever thought to build anything at all (2 Timothy 1:9). Help me stop mistaking my own effort for faith, and my own noise for prayer.
Quiet my heart the way you quieted Peter’s fear on the mountain. Let me hear your voice before I start building. I want to listen to you, not just work for you.
AMEN.