“It is good to be here”
“It is good to be here,” Peter says to James and John and to Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration and he goes on to suggest, “let us make three tents”, three tabernacles to mark the special nature of the occasion, showing, however, that he has completely misunderstood the meaning and the nature of Christ’s transfiguration! Poor Peter, so right and yet so wrong.
The vision on the mountain top, it is true, has included the Old Testament figures of Moses and Elijah, witnesses to the Law and the Prophets respectively. But Christ’s Transfiguration is not simply another addition to the Covenant between God and Man; it signals its radical transformation and completion and implies the realization of the meaning of the Old Covenant encapsulated for Israel in the Law and the Prophets. The Church remembers and celebrates the Transfiguration on August 6th.
Something seen and something heard. Jesus is transfigured before Peter, James and John, and, unlike the transfiguration of the face of Moses on Mount Sinai, too bright for the people of Israel to behold him, Jesus is seen: “his face did shine as the sun and his garment was white as the light.” There is something of a different order to Christ’s transfiguration and to its meaning for our humanity. And there is something heard; a voice is heard out of the bright cloud that overshadows them: “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased,” words which were also said at the occasion of Christ’s baptism in Jordan. But there is this difference here. The voice of the Father speaking out of the bright cloud of divine majesty and glory also bids us: “Hear ye him.”
“Guarda and escolta,” Dante is told in the terrestrial garden at the top of the Mountain of Purgatory in his superb allegory of the journey of the soul to God, the Divine Comedy. “Look and listen.” Only so, can we be made “pure and prepared to leap up to the stars”, to the paradise of God which is more than the garden of Eden, more than our valley pleasures here in the Maritimes. In the quiet stillness of early August, we might think this is paradise; at best it is only a foretaste of something far greater and more divine.
And yet, “it is good to be here”, as Peter has said, even if he is confused and uncertain about the nature of that good. Our churches are the buildings that recall us to that good.
It is good to be here because of what we are given to see and hear and what we are given to say and do. Our liturgy, for example, is all part of the wonder and the blessing of Christ’s transfiguration. We meet here where Word and Sacrament are proclaimed and celebrated. The Churches of our land are the places where the hopes of our human transformation are revealed and realised liturgically, both for us individually and collectively.
“Trashumanar,” as Dante again puts it, coining a word in Italian to capture this great and profound mystery, the mystery of human redemption which says that we are more, though not less, than all of the bits and pieces of our fractured and fragmented lives, more, though not less, than all of the fragments of memories that we cling to in the ruin of our loves in the face of death and dying, in the face of the ups and downs of human experience. It is, indeed, good for us to be here if we will, indeed, “hear ye him.”
A Short Meditation for the Transfiguration,
August 6th, 2010
Fr. David Curry