Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York
Br. Robert James Magliula
The Last Sunday after the Epiphany, March 2, 2025
When they encounter something new or different, my young nieces often ask, “Is it real?” Reality is determined by the five senses. If it cannot be seen, tasted, touched, smelled, or heard then it is not real – at least in this world. We tend to live with a veil that separates the exterior world of tangible, rational information from the inner world of mystery and encounter.
There are moments, however, when that veil is parted, and we stand in what the Celtic tradition calls a “thin place” between heaven and earth, the divine and the human, matter and spirit, the eternal and the temporal. In that thin place the duality of those parings disappears, and we stand in union and wholeness.
The difficulty for us is that, like my young nieces, we often limit our world and our experience to that which is understood and explainable. The senses themselves become the veil that separates us from that other world. Thin places invite us to step outside what we can know and enter the tremendous mystery of God’s presence and love.
Every year on this day, the season of Epiphany culminates in the Transfiguration. The Church sets it before us as the hinge between the end of Epiphany and the beginning of Lent. It reveals what an unveiled life looks like. In the Transfiguration the glory of divinity is united with humanity. Jesus didn’t become something he was not before that night on the mountain. He manifested what he always was, filled with the glory of God, radiating divine light. Jesus didn’t become something new, but the disciples did. They saw and experienced life and the world as God sees it, showing in humanity the archetypal beauty of its image. Christ revealed who we are and who, by grace, we are to become. He showed the theosis, the deification of human nature.
In a thin place we and our whole world stand in a different light. Jesus led Peter, James, and John to a thin place, where human ears would hear God’s voice, human eyes could see divine light, and human life would be enveloped in the cloud of God’s presence. That experience is the great longing of humanity. They beheld the beauty of their own creation in the image and likeness of God.
This is not simply a story about Peter, James, and John. It is descriptive of Christ’s encounter with all humanity. We too are called and invited to step through the parted veil. Transfiguration is all around us. Jesus is always leading us to the thin places of our life. We don’t often talk about these experiences. Like Peter, James, and John, we keep silent, not because those encounters are not real. Rather, because they are too real for words. Words could never describe the experience and would only diminish the mystery of the encounter. Each is distinct and unrepeatable. They are moments of pure grace. We cannot make them happen. We can only be there when it does happen. It’s a moment of complete presence and union. Everything belongs. Nothing has been lost or left out.
It’s not so much about what we see but how we see. Transfigured eyes do not deny or ignore the circumstances of our life or world. Sometimes our life is veiled in our failures, our fears, our forgetting. Other times the veil of grief and despair, ignorance, or the choices we have made leave us in darkness. Most of us, I think, seek God in the circumstances of life. We want God to show up and do something. But it’s not about the circumstances of life. It’s about us.
At some point we must begin to discover the God who is beyond the circumstances. Life on the surface keeps us judging the circumstances. The answer is found in depth, intimacy, and the vulnerability of the interior journey. We do not need to see new things. We need to see the same old things with new eyes. We do not need to escape the circumstances of our life. We need to be more fully present to those circumstances. This transfigured vision, is what allows us to face, endure, and respond to the circumstances of our life and world. It is why we can be unafraid.
On the mountain Peter wants to build dwelling places, wants to preserve the experience. We often are tempted to do the same, but that would only keep us in the past. To the extent we cling to the past we close ourselves to the future God offers. Jesus, Peter, James, and John came back down the mountain, but they took the vision with them. Transfigured moments change us, sustain us, prepare, encourage, and guide us into the future regardless of the circumstances we face. When you consider recent events in our country and our world it seems our lives and the world are more disfigured than transfigured.
These events do not negate the glory of God that fills this world. Instead, they reveal that far too often we are a people “weighed down with sleep’ like Peter, John, and James. They struggled between sleep and wakefulness. The spiritual journey is always a battle between falling asleep and staying awake, between absence and presence, darkness and light. Sleepiness is a spiritual condition. It is a form of blindness to the beauty and holiness of the world, other people, and ourselves. It is what allows us to do violence to one another and ourselves.
The Transfiguration of Christ shows us who we are. It reveals our origin, our purpose, and the end to which we must aim. It is not just an event in history, a happening that begins and ends. It is a condition and way of being. The Transfiguration reveals a present reality already within us and the world.
The disciples experienced the transfiguration because they stayed awake despite the weight of sleep. Regardless of how our life gets veiled the light of divinity is never extinguished but only covered up. This is why we need Lent, the season of unveiling, to discover the ways in which our lives have become veiled. The veils of our life can only be removed when we first know our life to be veiled. If you want to know the ways in which your life has become veiled go to the places of contradiction. Search out the places of struggle and conflict. Look for the ways in which you are living less than who you really want to be.
Peter, James, and John saw for the first time what has always been. Humanity can never build a dwelling place for God. It is God who makes humanity the dwelling place of divinity. The whole of creation participates in the glory of God. It is there that Christ reveals who we are and who, by grace, we are to become. Transfiguration invites us to wipe the sleep from our eyes, behold what we are, and become what we see. +Amen
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