Transfiguration: 2nd Sunday in Lent

Do you live under the tyranny of the Episodes? No?
You're welcome.

When I was five I had a spaceship. I flew it to stars still undetected by any telescope. I battled enemies who threatened all we hold dear, vanquishing them just in time for supper, my parents and sister blissfully unaware of how much danger they’d all been in. Such an important mission required a great deal of stealth and so, to protect it from detection, my spaceship was perfectly disguised as a cardboard refrigerator box. Here’s the thing: at the time, I really wouldn’t have been enjoying myself more if it had been real. I really mean it - a boy with a real spaceship fighting a real extraterrestrial menace would not have had more fun than I did.

You could say, “that’s all very cute, and that’s the magic of childhood, but like it or not we have to grow up and live in the real world. Life is too serious to spend playing pretend.” And that’s absolutely true. But it is not true - it is a grotesque and damnable lie - that growing up and living in the real world means leaving all the magic and wonder and adventure behind. We were right when we were little. I do not mean that we were right in some poetic or metaphorical way. I mean that we were factually and plainly correct, at least about all the important things. We only had some of the details wrong.

I know now that my spaceship was not a real spaceship, but I would not return to that fantasy if I could because I find the real world to be not less fantastic and astonishing, but infinitely more so. Blasting off in my box, I had great dreams, but none so great as the real Orion Nebula. Never did my imagination achieve anything approaching what is there in my telescope... a vaporous sea of mind-blowing vastness, a cosmic nursery in which stars are being born. Stars being born! And my real telescope is not only a window through space, but through time. Focused on the Orion Nebula, I am peering back through more than a millennium, to 669 A.D., when the photons of that image first began their journey across the universe to land on my retina.

This is a real thing that exists. Your argument is invalid.

The enemies I fought in those days were dark and terrible, aligned against everything that is good and innocent in the world, and lurking where you’d least expect. Was I wrong? You tell me.

But most of the time, the Orion nebula and the desperate battle with evil are simply not on my mind. They can’t be, or I’d be even worse at answering emails than I already am. We can’t live our lives in full awareness of reality; we aren’t built for it, we aren’t capable of it. If we really perceived, really experienced the full wonder of everything we saw, heard, touched... that’s an unthinkable concept. We can’t hold that much glory. 

Can I give you another image from astronomy? Let’s say you want to point your telescope at the sun, maybe to look at a solar flare close-up. Well, you can’t do it because, if you did, you would never see anything out of that eye again. It would be burned out. Your eye was designed to perceive light - but it can't handle all the light. Still, there is a way you can look at the sun through a telescope. You have to use a filter that blocks almost all the light, just letting a tiny fraction of it through. Then you can look at that solar flare.

Well, that’s how we experience the world. That’s how we experience beauty and goodness and truth and love. If you really experienced for just a moment the full importance and glory and drama of a single other human being, you’d be on the floor in some kind of catatonic burnout. But here we are in a room full of other human beings. We need the filter to function.

But once in a while we get a little glimpse, like a little corner of the veil has been lifted. And that’s what - or at least that’s part of what - the Transfiguration is about.

What was it like to see Jesus of Nazareth passing on the street? There must have something about him, because people had a way of abandoning everything they knew just because he asked them to follow. But on the other hand, there were also those who considered him to be simply deranged or heretical. His glory was veiled. It had to be. Like Moses said, no one can look on the face of God and live. What would it even mean to look straight at the face of God? Far easier to point a telescope directly at the sun! So he was veiled.

But the Transfiguration is one of those times when we catch a glimpse, an ever-so-slight lifting of the corner of the veil. Many people passed by Jesus of Nazareth every day without a second look. But that wasn’t the reality. The reality was glory beyond all imagination. Not everyone could see it, but that day Peter and James and John got a tiny glimpse, and they were changed. The Transfigured Christ was the reality. The “ordinary” Christ was the illusion.

We understood this as children even if, as I said, we were wrong about some of the details. Cinderella is a story about the Transfiguration. Cinderella isn’t the story of an ordinary nobody who spends a wild evening disguised as a princess. It’s the story of an extraordinary princess who is disguised as a nobody before her true self is unveiled in a whirl of fairy magic. The tale of Rapunzel may contain an insignificant factual error about the measured length of a young woman’s hair, but it is correct about the much more amazing fact of its mystical power where young men are concerned. The tale of the Frog Prince may have exaggerated certain unimportant physiological details, but it is quite correct in its primary meaning that we will never really see the truth about others unless we first take the wild risk of of loving them. 

The point I’m trying to make is that reality is far more astonishing than the fairy tales. A boy may with difficulty believe that a girl could decide to kiss a frog, but nothing can prepare him for the wild shock of the day when a girl decides to kiss him. A girl may marvel at the story of the princess who’s taken a conk on the head and is living in a foreign land unaware that she’s really a princess. But what a marvelous day it will be when that girl realizes she is herself in exactly that position!

Any frog might be a prince. Any bean might be the way to giant-land. Any half-glimpsed face in the crowd might be the disguised Robin Hood. Any boy on the street might be the one to take hold of the sword in the stone and save the nation. Any girl looking around with big shining eyes might really be a mermaid.

St. Paul said that when he became a man, he set aside childish things. But C.S. Lewis pointed out that one of the really childish things we must set aside is the desire to be very grown up. Life is too serious to spend playing pretend: too serious to pretend it’s ordinary, too serious to pretend there are no monsters, too serious to pretend the world doesn’t need to be saved every day. Love is too serious to pretend it doesn’t take a hero to pull it off. And it’s all far too serious, too magical, too enchanted, too miraculous, to pretend we have it figured out.