SECOND WEEK OF LENT

 

Matthew 17:1-9 The Transfiguration

 

Last week we were in a desert facing our demons and then being looked after by angels who spend a little time comforting us. This week we are atop a misty mountain and our beloved, though mysterious and elusive teacher, reveals himself to us in a way that shatters our hope of any real intimacy with him. We see him (as Arjuna saw Krishna in Chapter 11 of the Gita) in his cosmic glory, his physical body and whole being blindingly translucent. We see what we might have suspected: that the truth of him transcends the realm of time and space in which we felt drawn to him. Maybe we are hugely privileged to see this but we are utterly unable to respond adequately and so we look away and are terrified. Then, without our seeing it, he comes close again in a way we recognise, touches us and tells us not to be afraid. He is again how we have always known him, yet we can never forget what we have seen even though we might want to.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if we could be content merely to see things at the level of appearance? Yet, even when we are not in one of those rare moments, glimpsing the real in the unreal, the eternal in the transitory, even if we are comfortably ensconced in the mundane level of awareness, we cannot help but sense that what appears is never the whole truth. Life entails the risk that blinding truth might break through the familiar at any instant and upturn everything. We long for this almost as much as we fear it.

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Fear is instinctive and chemical and self-centred: the amygdala sends SOS signals to the hypothalamus and I get a rush of adrenalin and cortisol. It is about saving my life as I know it and avoiding the risk of knowing it in any other way because I might lose control of it. So, I recoil from any change in a familiar pattern and desperately try to stay safe where I am even if it is a place and self-inflicted pattern of shame. Fear gives us the reason not to take the risk of an imprisoning pattern dissolving.

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Even when we try to be free and creative, fear prevents us by imagining exposure and rejection. The possibility of trying and failing is terrifying. We balk at making even a small decision that might change things. If we do try, we pause half-way, feeling inauthentic in the uncompleted process that would change us. I turn back or go on at a snail’s pace. If someone, something, somehow doesn’t approach and touch us and tell us not to be afraid we might never reconnect to the courage to be human and alive. 

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This story strikes me as less of a manifestation of glory shining through the surface as a revelation of tenderness and patience that touches us deeper than the skin of things and suggesting a proof of what God is really like: so much more like us than we think.

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Laurence Freeman
Lenten Reflections 2024

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