A Reflection for
Last Sunday of Epiphany All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC
February 7, 2016 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Views From
Transfiguration Mountain
 | |
| This is Mount Tabor, a suggested site of Transfiguration. but Transfiguration is anywhere. |
I was taking a break
from thinking about the Transfiguration Gospel story for today and I
came across a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.
As once the winged
energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the god
wants to know himself in you.
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the god
wants to know himself in you.
God
has this habit of speaking to me when I am not fully paying
attention. I suddenly stopped where I had been going in looking at
this story and realized that one way to see this story is to see it
using Rilke’s words - Jesus taking his “practiced powers” to
“span the chasm between the two (divine and human) contradictions”
and the god knows Godself in Jesus. The light of God shines forth and
the divine illumines the human shadow. Then when Jesus comes off the
mountain he meets a man whose child is bound up in the darkness which
they called a demon. Jesus brings healing by bringing his, using
Rilke’s words, “great arch of unimagined bridges” to the
moment, and the encounter with wholeness brings wholeness in the
child.
Jesus
comes into the world to do two things: 1) To show humans the face of
God and 2) to show humans, created in the image of God, how to live
fully into being human images of God. In his parables Jesus speaks to
the former by saying “The Kingdom of God is like this . . .” and
then he tells a story that shakes up our image of God by showing the
love, freedom, and compassion of God rather than the capricious old
man above the sky that punishes those mere humans who displease him.
Jesus has as one part of his mission the continuation of the
prophetic tradition calling for a replacement of the faraway distant
God of fear with the indwelling Spirit of the loving creator and
sustainer of the universe who is so accessible in every breath we
take. When Jesus prays, he does not go through an elaborate
flattering of the divine, but he starts off by saying “Abba”,
which we translate as “Daddy”, an affectionate nickname to be
only used in the family. He demonstrates that we are all the children
of God, even our enemies, and we have the same loving parent. Jesus
is working to reform a religion which has as its model a hierarchy of
power under the rule of a tyrant who must be placated and replace it
with an intentional community centered on the divine energy flowing
through us.
This
religion of an “intentional community centered on the divine energy
flowing through us” shows us a new way of being fully human, and
Jesus shows not just with his words but in his very life how to be
fully human in the image of God. Jesus demonstrates integrity between
who we are at the core of our being and how we act in this world. We
were created to be free, loving, and compassionate in the doctrine of
original blessing. However, sometimes we get sidetracked and freedom
is sacrificed to control, loving is tainted with fear of others, and
compassion replaced by self-serving which we mislabel as original
sin. Blessing is when we are dancing to the music of God in this
life; sin is when we refuse to dance with God. To dance with God is
not a series of steps but to let our true self be still enough to let
the music guide us. Jazz musician Charlie Parker used to say, “If
it ain’t in your heart; it ain’t in your horn.”
Let
me go further: “freedom” is not freedom “from” but freedom
“for”, and freedom must be channeled to do good. Channeling can
easily be sidetracked to a dark side where we try to control the
outcome and control others, heaping shame on ourselves and guilt on
others if the perfect outcome is not achieved. The shame within
ourselves is so uncomfortable that we push it down, and as a way of
hiding from it from awareness, we project the shame and guilt on
others. This shame, guilt, and thirst for control contaminates our
relationships with others and our deeper self. Others become
strangers to us and we become strangers to ourselves
“Loving”
is not approval, but sometimes we get it confused and withhold love
from others and ourselves until we think they or we deserve that
love. Without love as the basis for relationships with others and
ourselves, we become suspicious and fear takes the place of love.
When fear is a part of the relationship, compassion is replaced by
the frantic search for something to make our anxiety go away, and we
find ways to meet that emptiness with people, places, and things we
can consume or control.
Without
freedom, love, and compassion, we become like the demon possessed
child in today’s Gospel story, being controlled by forces we are
not able to understand, throwing ourselves down on the ruins of our
lives.
Jesus
shows what a life of integrity between who we are at the core of our
being, that which we call our soul, the places that the numinous
lives within us, and the way we act in the world should look like;
this can be given only by grace from a power greater than ourselves
or as Rilke says,
“a bright and purely granted achievement”.
The transfiguration is the metaphorical demonstration of that
integrity where the light of God’s indwelling spirit lives within
us and radiates to the world around us.
The
Transfiguration is not something that happened on a mountain a couple
thousand years ago but is available here and now when we are able to
have our true self come forward into the world, helping to create a
community of trust and healing. As Rilke reminds us, “being swept
along is not enough.” As followers of Jesus, we are the ones who go
out into the world to bring the light of the Transfigured Christ to
others and in the same way we are the children who need the light
ourselves.
Views
From Transfiguration Mount (Poem)
Hiking
to top of storied Mount Transfiguration,
looks
down on where a stagnating violence be,
when
fog came silently sliding in and I can see
contradiction
within myself between core station
and
what in my darkness I fear; light’s exposure.
Yet,
fill me with your light that all that’s hidden
be
radiantly cleansed as no fuller can be bidden.
First
I must own it, naming it as mine own sure,
rather
than see myself a victim. Tis much a lie
to
give away what I do not first lay file a claim
Now,
Mediterranean clouds fly to eastern plain
to
deserts, bringing moisture to a ground so dry.
My
unasked dew dries by that now unmasked Sol
makes
a healing balm of Gilead for a deeper soul.
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