Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen
The Last Sunday after the Epiphany, February 11, 2024
Click here for an audio of the sermon
“I’m aware […] that it may be hard to imagine the enormity of this moment,” he writes, “the threshold that once crossed would leave behind a world that had endured for centuries, and that this moment was only sixty years ago. Consider this: when the electricity finally did come, it was discovered that the 100-watt bulb was too bright for [the little village of] Faha. The instant garishness was too shocking. Dust and cobwebs were discovered to have been thickening on every surface since the sixteenth century. Reality was appalling. It turned out Siney Dunne’s fine head of hair was a wig, not even close in colour to the scruff of his neck, Mick King was an out-and-out and fairly unsubtle cheater at Forty-Five, and Marian McGlynn’s healthy allure was in fact a caked make-up the color of red turf ash. In the week following the switch-on, Tom Clohessy couldn’t keep mirrors in stock, had a run on hand-, oval-, round- and even full-length as people came in from out the country and bought looking glasses of all variety, went home and in merciless illumination endured the chastening of all flesh when they saw what they looked like for the first time.”
I imagine a similar transformation in human awareness with Christ’s transfiguration on Mount Tabor. Sure, the light has been growing warmer and brighter as Epiphany has progressed. There is the sudden illumination each of the disciples experiences when Jesus looks at them and calls them. Surely, in their first encounter with Jesus, they are each revealed to themselves in ways they could never have imagined. But the illumination dims, at least somewhat, in the growing dailiness of their new lives, and they get on with things, as we all do.
Not so with the Transfiguration. The unveiling of Christ’s light in on the mountain not only reveals his glory—it also transfigures the whole cosmos, revealing the reality of God hidden in plain sight all the time.
As Williams knows, there is something threatening in the revelation of light. Light reveals the dirt that has lain on the surface of our lives, literally and metaphorically, for far too long. Light can be merciless in its unflinching gaze. Remember that Moses had to wear a veil over his face after spending time with God, lest God’s glory, reflected in Moses’ face, should overwhelm the Israelites. Too much light can blind as much as total darkness.
We need our light tempered, perhaps even meted out bit by bit. That’s partly why God comes to us in Jesus, a human person to whom we can relate perhaps more naturally than to the fullness of God the Creator, who is all light and all darkness.
In Jesus, God’s light moderates itself. From time to time, like Peter, James, and John on Mount Tabor, or like Mary Magdalene at the tomb, we get a vision of the full glory of God reflected in Jesus. But most of the time, we get the 40-watt version, enough to see but not enough to blind.
As Christ’s light illuminates our lives, we come to see ourselves and reality more fully as we are. And while at the beginning that illumination may strike us as merciless—as indeed it can be from time to time—Christ’s light is not meant to overwhelm us with our smallness, our dirtiness, or our insufficiency. In that way the light of Christ differs from the artificial light with which we fill our lives.
The light of lamps and televisions and phone screens inverts our attention and encourages our self-absorption. Like the residents of little Faha, we surround ourselves with mirrors so that, in merciless illumination we can obsess over our so-called flaws; implement self-improvement plans; and market ourselves to an indifferent world. The false illumination of the screen has turned us all into modern-day Narcissi, so in love with—or horrified by—our own reflections that we are liable to drown in them.
Instead, the light of Christ is the light of Resurrection. It is the wound that heals. In the light of Christ we are revealed as we truly are. We may be covered in centuries of dirt and dust, but the light of God shines through the cracks in the mud that cakes our skin. We, too, are transfigured on the holy mountain of our ordinary little lives. The light of Christ reveals us as bridge between heaven and earth, the beloved children of God, guilty, yes, but loved beyond and through that guilt.
Held in this light, we know that we cannot go on the way we have before. That to return to the dark oblivion of self-absorption is no longer tenable. In the words of Rilke’s great poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “there is no place that does not see you. / You must change your life.”
Christ does look on us primarily through the eyes of judgement. Always, always, he sees us through the eyes of mercy and of love. We need not fear or shrink back from the full illumination of our lives in the light of Christ, because that light is love itself and the promise that love always wins.
And when the light fades back to a tolerable brightness, as it inevitably will, we find ourselves once again with the ordinary human Jesus and our ordinary human selves. Yet something has changed in the moment of revelation. Because we know now that these little lives we’ve been given are the summit—the full outpouring—of God’s extraordinary grace to us. Yes, your life, just as it is, right here and now, in this very moment is the tabernacle of God’s glory and the sacrament of God’s love. The only appropriate response is yes.
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