By meditating on the breath and the power within and behind the breath, we realize in the deepest levels of our being that our life is sustained by God. We do not breathe by our own will; God is sustaining our life and everything else in creation... We are born into this world and we will die and live this world. Our first breath and our last breath, the two most important events in our life, are not in our conscious control. Because our breathing is automatic and involuntary, it is easy to forget about the gift of breath — gift of God.
Transfiguring experience is not granted to people as an easy and ready access to glory. Only in going up the mountain, rejecting and being rejected by the world, identifying with those who are most broken, does one encounter the divine refulgence...Our substitution of consumer tourism for pilgrimage, of canned experience for life-changing risk, is symptomatic of our inability to entertain in any way the reality of our own transfiguration.