Transfigured by Light, Voice, and Touch

For the last week or so, I’ve been in the grips of a great spiritual struggle. I share this because I want you to know that even those of us who serve in ministry roles or who have learned a lot of theology aren’t immune to struggles in faith.

For reasons I won’t go into, I’ve spent the bulk of my life trying to “fix” myself, to make myself worthy of love and care.

You see, my life experience has led me to believe, deep in my heart, that love is scarce, and that there isn’t enough to go around. I’ve believed that the only way I can get what I need is to do everything right, to perform perfectly enough – like a twirling circus monkey – in order to get the attention of those I want to love and be loved by, including God.

For years, I’ve wrestled with what I call my “denying-father-bad-boyfriend-god,” the one that I can never please, the one that thinks I’m “too needy.”

And even though my head knows full well that this is a toxic god image that is neither true nor worthy of worship, my heart still bears the scars of years of disappointment, especially in the areas of love and work.

Inside my heart, there’s a little child sitting in a dark prison, waiting for the great love – human or divine – that will release me once and for all.

The hot crucible I’m in now is that I’m being challenged to surrender the performing perfectionistic ego in me that can’t bear how uncontrollable and unpredictable life is. How messy it is. How hard it all is. This is the part of me that has spent years working and working on what the monk Thomas Merton used to call a “salvation project” – the means by which we think we can bring about our own salvation. The way that we think we can avoid the necessary suffering that comes with a life in which death and impermanence are unavoidable.

This is the passion mystery of Jesus: that resurrection can only come when we are willing to go all the way into the darkness and surrender completely to our powerlessness.

What a humiliation for the ego! We can’t bear that truth, and so we do all kinds of things – set up all kinds of salvation projects – to avoid it.

We get attached to group identities, excluding those who aren’t in our tribe, thinking that will save us from having to suffer. We engage in empty rituals, thinking that if we dance fast enough or commune hard enough, we can dodge the suffering when it comes raining down like hail stones. But we can dance for the rest of our lives and it wouldn’t be enough to keep pain away.

Today, our gospel is about the transfiguration of Christ. It’s the story of Jesus ascending the mountain – just like Moses did – for the revelation of God. Jesus encounters Moses and Elijah – symbolizing the Law and the Prophets, the core of the Jewish faith – and is transfigured in the light. Then the voice of God says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”

Jesus hears that voice and so do Peter, James, and John. Peter writes about witnessing this event in his second letter.

In fact, hearing that voice throws the disciples into such a terror that they fall flat on the ground and can’t get up again until Jesus touches them. The light astonishes them, but it’s the touch that restores them.

But what is the point of this transfiguration story? What difference does it make for us today? Have we experienced the light? Are we touched by Jesus when we’re face down on the floor in fear?

Because if we’re not, then I’m not sure what the point of all of this is. If Jesus won’t touch me in my darkness today and touch each of you in your darkness too, then I’m not sure a promise of some heavenly by and by is enough.

I was recently listening to a video of Father Thomas Keating, one of the founders of the centering prayer contemplative movement that began in the 1960s. He said that in our tradition, we believe that Jesus takes on all the consequences of human sin and frailty. That’s why on the cross he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He feels utterly abandoned and alone.

Father Keating says that when Christians say in the Creed that Jesus descended into hell, we can understand that as meaning that Jesus enters the psychological state of utter alienation from God, the complete absence of God. And it’s only after he has fully entered that excruciating absence and surrendered to it that he is raised by God into new life.

It’s believed that Peter wrote his letter while he was being held in a Roman prison sometime around the year 65 AD, shortly before his execution under Emperor Nero. Imagine the kind of darkness and abandonment he must have been feeling.

But what does he say in this time of darkness? He urges the people to whom he’s writing to keep their eyes on the lighted lamp as they wait in the darkness until the morning star rises in their hearts. What is the morning star?  

The morning star is the Christ and allowing that star to rise in our hearts means experiencing at our very core the source of our true identity, our living water, and our hope, even in the darkness of life.

I believe that it’s only because Peter heard the voice of the living God up on that mountain, and then even more importantly because he was touched by Jesus in his intense fear, that he can write about that hope.

In our humanness, we do everything we can to avoid sitting in our doubt, our darkness, our suffering, and our abandonment. We desperately medicate our way out of those uncomfortable feelings with work, food, busyness – whatever it takes.

On the mountain, there was the light, the voice, and the touch. And we know because Jesus descended into the hell of utter abandonment, that when we go there, he is right there with us even if it’s too dark for us to see him.

Maybe we can take Peter’s witness of transfiguration with us as a small lamp and carry the testimony of all the saints that have gone before us as the remembered voice of God. And maybe even when we can’t feel the touch of Jesus directly in our fear, we can feel it through each other in community.

I pray this is true for me, and I pray this is true for you too.