19th February 2011 Saturday Sixth Week in Ordinary Time: Transfiguration

 Mass readings for today are here

Transfiguration art from The Saint John's Bible - Source and website

• Click here for my post from 2010 on the Feast of The Transfiguration which last year fell on The Second Sunday of Lent.

• Click here for a lovely reflection on Thin Places, Veils and the Transfiguration.

• I stumbled across this excellent piece - "A glimpse of God", which I like because it leads us from the Transfiguration onto the journey into preparing for Lent.

• This pithy piece is titled The Transfiguration : The Real Truth Or A Pernicious Superstition ?

Gospel Mark 9: 2-13

Jesus took Peter, James, and John
and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves.

And he was transfigured before them,
and his clothes became dazzling white,
such as no fuller on earth could bleach them.

Then Elijah appeared to them along with Moses,
and they were conversing with Jesus.

Then Peter said to Jesus in reply,
“Rabbi, it is good that we are here!
Let us make three tents:
one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
He hardly knew what to say, they were so terrified.

Then a cloud came, casting a shadow over them;
then from the cloud came a voice,
“This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.”

Suddenly, looking around, the disciples no longer saw anyone
but Jesus alone with them.

As they were coming down from the mountain,
he charged them not to relate what they had seen to anyone,
except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

So they kept the matter to themselves,
questioning what rising from the dead meant.

Then they asked him,
“Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?”

He told them, “Elijah will indeed come first and restore all things,
yet how is it written regarding the Son of Man
that he must suffer greatly and be treated with contempt?

But I tell you that Elijah has come
and they did to him whatever they pleased,

as it is written of him.”

                                        

  Image of Transfiguration above by Cornelis Monsma - Source.

Poem on Transfiguration by Mark Jarman

They were talking to him about resurrection, about law, about the suffering ahead. They were talking as if to remind him who he was and who they were. He was not Like his three friends watching a little way off, not like the crowd At the foot of the hill. A gray-green thunderhead massed from the sea And God spoke from it and said he was his. They were talking About how the body, broken or burned, could live again, remade. Only the fiery text of the thunderhead could explain it. And they were talking About pain and the need for judgement and how he would make himself A law of pain, both its spirit and its letter in his own flesh, and then break it, That is, transcend it. His clothes flared like magnesium, as they talked.

Sufjan Stevens song and video below :The Transfiguration set to famous pieces of art.

After The Transfiguration

By Kathy Coffey

Grinding up the steep incline,
our calves throbbing,
we talked of problems
and slapped at flies.
Then you touched my shoulder,
said, "turn around."

Behind us floated
surprise mountains
blue on lavender,
water-colored ranges:
a glimpse from God's eyes.

Descending, how could we chat
mundanely of the weather, like deejays?
We wondered if, returning,
James and John had squabbled:
whose turn to fetch the water,
after the waterfall of grace?

After he imagined the shining tents,
did Peter's walls seem narrow,
smell of rancid fish?
Did feet that poised on Tabor
cross the cluttered porch?
After the bleached light,
could eyes adjust to ebbing
grey and shifting shade?

Cradling the secret in their sleep
did they awaken cautiously,
wondering if the mountaintop
would gild again-bringing
that voice, that face?

This remarkable poem on the Transfiguration is by the Orkney writer Edwin Muir (1887-1959).

In 1901, when Muir was 14, Muir’s family was forced to move to Glasgow after loosing the family farm, ‘The Bu’. This move from the peaceful Orkney to industrialised Glasgow was significantly traumatic for Muir, and he would later describe it as a descent from the innocence of a rural Eden into Hell. 

Not only was the Glasgow environment hard, but within a few years two of his brothers and both his parents were dead. 

Muir, along with his wife, Willa, was one of the first translators of Franz Kafka’s work into English.

In this poem, Muir describes visionary experiences he had while undergoing analysis. 

This poem is not about the event described in all four of the Gospels in which Christ’s divinity is revealed to his disciples. Instead it suggests what has to happen in the world if Christ is to return. 

The entire creation must “call him with one voice.” 
This original vision—both original and unorthodox—allows history to have a fresh start. 
Christ will be not only “uncrucified” but “discrucified,” and Judas will take “his long journey backward / From darkness into light.” His betrayal will be “quite undone and never more be done.”

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.

We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness,
But that even they, though sour and travel stained,
Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance,
And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us
Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined
As in a morning field. Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
And nowhere? Was the change in us alone,
And the enormous earth still left forlorn,
An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world
We saw that day made this unreal, for all
Was in its place. The painted animals
Assembled there in gentle congregations,
Or sought apart their leafy oratories,
Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together,
As if, also for them, the day had come.

The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath
The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps
Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;
For he had said, ‘To the pure all things are pure.’
And when we went into the town, he with us,
The lurkers under doorways, murderers,
With rags tied round their feet for silence, came
Out of themselves to us and were with us,
And those who hide within the labyrinth
Of their own loneliness and greatness came,
And those entangled in their own devices,
The silent and the garrulous liars, all
Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.

Reality or vision, this we have seen.
If it had lasted but another moment
It might have held forever! But the world
Rolled back into its place, and we are here,
And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn,
As if it had never stirred; no human voice
Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks
To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines
And blossoms for itself while time runs on.
But he will come again, it’s said, though not
Unwanted, unsummoned; for all things,
Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and seas,
And all mankind from end to end of the earth
Will call him with one voice. In our own time,
Some say, or at a time when time is ripe.
Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified,
Christ the discrucified, his death undone,
His agony unmade, his cross dismantled -
Glad to be so – and the tormented wood
Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree
In a green springing corner or young Eden,
And Judas damned take his long journey backward
From darkness into light and be a child
Beside his mother’s knee, and the betrayal
Be quite undone and never more be done.

 Edwin Muir

A Prayer on The Feast of the Transfiguration  
by Trevin Wax

O God,
We open our eyes and we see Jesus,
the months of ministry transfigured to a beam of light,
the light of the world,
your light.
May your light shine upon us.

We open our eyes and we see Moses and Elijah,
your word restoring us, showing us the way,
telling a story,
your story, his story, our story.

May your word speak to us.

We open our eyes and we see mist,
the cloud of your presence
which assures us of all we do not know
and that we do not need to fear that.
Teach us to trust.

We open our eyes and we see Peter’s constructions,
his best plans, our best plans,
our missing the point,
our missing the way.

Forgive our foolishness and sin

We open our eyes and we see Jesus,
not casting us off,
but leading us down, leading us out -
to ministry, to people.
Your love endures forever.

We open our ears and we hear your voice,
‘This is my beloved Son, listen to him!’
And we give you thanks.

- Amen

                     Video below Lux Aurumque Eric Whitaker