“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.”
Most of the time, the world passes by and we are left by faith to trust that God is with us. We don’t always get to see the divine so clearly as the disciples did in today’s gospel. We trust, especially through the Eucharist and the other sacraments, that God is here, but it is rarely as explicit as it is for Peter, James, and John.
We may be blessed with such vision on occasion. This kind of religious experience can be so powerful that it lasts a lifetime. Yet, it doesn't suffice, for we still must live by faith each day. After all, later, down from the mountain, having seen the vision and wanting to stay there, Peter would still deny the Lord three times.
What is it like, this kind of vision today? Ever since I read it in seminary, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize, has been a favorite. Annie Dillard describes an experience of revelation. She had heard of a blind girl, who after receiving her sight and upon first looking upon a tree described it as the tree with the lights in it. Dillard writes:
“It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The lights of the fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
Thomas Merton, a monk from the Abbey of Gethsemane near Bardstown, had his own revelatory experience here in Louisville. He writes in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
These are extraordinary, but each day, in the little things, by faith, may we also see God.