Sitting with the Sacred

Luke 9:28b-36

“Listen to him,” I hear in this week’s gospel (Luke 9:35). And sometimes I think it would be easier to follow that instruction if I could clearly see him or if I could see that everything was going to turn out all that right in the end. Trusting without seeing is so hard a lot of the time.

But this gospel passage reminds me that Peter, James, and John received the sort of vision I sometimes wish I had. The way I imagine their experience suggests to me that seeing Jesus as he is now — glorified — wouldn’t necessarily transform me for the better in an instant.

In fact, the sight might add to any feelings of being overwhelmed, fearful, and confused that I might have had beforehand. Why? Because I’d be seeing something powerful and indescribable, something I’d never seen before, something familiar and yet, quite literally, out-of-this-world.

The most relatable conception I can come up with for what this experience might be like is an eerily realistic dream. It transcends the experience of waking life, yet it feels somehow just as real, if not more real than everyday experiences do. Maybe that’s because this kind of dream would tap into a deeper part of ourselves that we can’t — or don’t — access when we think we’re in full control of our senses and our consciousness.

I don’t see being witnesses to the Transfiguration as a circumstance in which the three apostles needed to “Do whatever he tells you” (See John 2:5). Instead, I see the circumstance as a situation in which their defenses were lowered so they could go to sleep and be awakened, refreshed and ready to listen. (See Luke 9:32). The spiritual life includes times for talking and doing, but that period on the mountain wasn’t one of those times (See Luke 9:36).

An experience like witnessing the Transfiguration needs time to sink in and to be understood better. An experience like that one doesn’t provide immediate answers, so it’s not entirely comforting. Yet wouldn’t an experience like that get the people witnessing it out of their own way for a moment and allow God to work in them?

Could witnessing the Transfiguration be said to share additional characteristics with other life-changing experiences? I mean other experiences that jar us out of our comfortable routines, that leave us speechless, or cause us to see the people around us in a different light. Such experiences may provide us insight into our previous experiences or give us a glimpse of possibilities we hadn’t imagined before. They may make our lives flash before our eyes. They may involve a mix of intense emotions, and they take time to process, but we may also see God in them.

Work cited

The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.