Last Epiphany
Guest Post by Isabel Anders
“The Christian Year ... illustrates the highest use of our fleeting days, and weeks, and months, in filling them with Christ as He, the Son of Man, traverses time from Bethlehem to the throne of God in glory” —George Seymour in The Place of the Feast of the Transfiguration in the Church Year (1893).
Chapel of Transfiguration, Camp Mitchell
Joan Chittister in There Is a Season (1995) tells the Hasidic story of the rabbi who disappeared every Shabat Eve, “to commune with God in the forest”—or so his congregation thought.
One Sabbath night the people sent one of their cantors to follow the rabbi and observe the holy encounter. Deeper and deeper into the woods the rabbi went until he came to the small cottage of an old Gentile woman, sick to death and crippled into a painful posture.
Once he was there, the rabbi cooked for her and carried her firewood and swept her floor. Then when the chores were finished, he returned immediately to his little house next to the synagogue.
Back in the village, the people demanded of the one they’d sent to follow him, “Did our rabbi go up to heaven as we thought?”
“Oh, no,” the cantor answered after a thoughtful pause. “Our rabbi went much higher than that.”
When a human being “transcends” what is expected or usual and “goes beyond”—we find ourselves dumbfounded and stopped in our tracks. Imagine how much greater the disciples’ reaction to Jesus on the mountain of Transfiguration would have been—without adequate words to describe the experience—“higher than heaven.” As Frederick Buechner explains, “Every once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures a human face that it’s almost beyond bearing.”
Thus we struggle to convey the impact—and the reality—of today’s experience of Jesus at the end of the Church season of Epiphany, when light comes to us concentrated in his Person. It is as though the Source of all Light were standing right before us and the disciples, and we are sharing their awe in the mystery.
As St. Ephraem of Syrus, a Syrian scholar (306–373) wrote:
He came down,
And veiled his face
With a veil of flesh.
In the brilliance of his light
All Jordan became light.
He was radiant on the mountain
To a small degree,
Yet they, the apostles called the “pillars”
Were shivering, trembling, aghast.
He granted them a glimpse of his secret glory
To the extent that they could bear.
May we too observe this occasion of light to the extent and limits that we can bear.
—Isabel Anders has coauthored Circle of Days with Paula Franck.