In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.
The last two weeks, I’ve had a lot of trouble sleeping. I lie awake for hours, pressed into the bed by fatigue, halfway to dreaming. One night this week, when I’d finally fallen asleep, I tossed all night dreaming that I was awake, searching anxiously for the key that would let me finally surrender to sleep. The next morning, I woke up convinced that in my frantic dream search, I had found two of the three pieces of my broken heart. Not a bad trade for one restless night, I suppose.
Praying with that dream, I found myself wondering what I would do if I found that third piece. A voice answered, “I would become all love.” If I found the last piece of my broken heart, I would step out of the prison of my own defenses and I would become all love.
A once broken, walled up heart, united and radiant in love—what better image for the transfigured Christ within and among us?
Peter, James, and John suffered their share of insomnia, too. In an inverse portrait of the scene in the garden of Gethsemane, today’s reading from Luke tells us that “Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw [Jesus’] glory.” (Luke 9:32) Perhaps in that moment some fragment of their own fractured hearts returned to them and they wondered what would happen if their hearts were whole once more. Perhaps they, too, found abundant compensation for a sleepless night.
Certainly, the moment Luke portrays stays with Peter his whole life, laying the foundation for his ministry and martyrdom. A moment so powerful that he commends us to “be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” (2 Peter 1:19)
We have all had such moments, experiences where, even for a moment, the veil between heaven and earth is lifted, and we see ourselves and all the world around us shining with God’s radiance. We might be tempted to cling to these moments of revelation, but clinging will not do. Rather, we must attend to them as a to a lamp shining in a dark place, trusting that over the course of a lifetime of faithfulness, the day will dawn and the morning star will rise in our hearts.
Our own transfiguration, which is another way of thinking of conversion to Christ, takes a lifetime of gentle attention, until finally we release and become all love.
A friend sent me a card recently with a line from Hafiz. It said “An awake heart is like a sky that pours light.” That one missing piece of our broken hearts is the one Jesus holds within his own, safeguarding it to the day of our return. It may be that that one missing piece is the absence that keeps our hearts awake, weighed down though we may be with sleep and forgetting, the missing bit that tunes the ear of our heart to listen for the voice of one calling us home again until we, too, can become all love.
Come, transfigured Jesus. Come, and draw our hearts to yours. Enfold and transfigure us. Make us all love.
Amen.
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