Transfiguration and Last Sunday of Epiphany
"If we want to find God, then honor God within ourselves, and we will always see God beyond us. For it is only God in us who knows where and how to look for God."— Richard Rohr Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009), 159-161.
Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany, where we say goodbye to Alleluia and prepare for Ash Wednesday tomorrow and the first day of Lent. Sunday, we heard the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus when he is revealed on a high mountain to three of his disciples as the incarnation of God. Anyone in 12-step recovery can identify immediately with transfiguration, seeing the light, a moment of clarity, encountering the God who has been there all along within us, but we never saw before because we were busy making "dwellings" for other idols, alcohol, food, drugs, work, etc.
Moments of transfiguration occur in our lives when we are transported from our deep unconscious sleep to a moment of conscious bright light when we see, feel, taste, and touch God. Transfiguration is also about experiencing our true nature, the part of God inside us. It is the moment when all else falls away, and we are simply of God and desire to turn our life and our will over to the care of God. It is that moment when we let go and let God.
Richard Rohr believes we cannot see God in others until we first see God within ourselves. So, recovery is seeing God first within ourselves, which leads us to being able to see God in others. We encounter that person who once annoyed us, and we begin to notice a tiny glimpse of the face of God, and our only response is now love.
Frederick Buechner reminds us that as we see God within ourselves, we begin to see God in situations we never saw before: "the face of a man walking his child in the park, a woman picking peas in the garden, sometimes even the unlikeliest person listening to a concert, standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in, or just sitting with friends at a Saturday baseball game in July. Every once in so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it's almost beyond bearing." 1
Transfiguration is the message and the promise of a new way of living, seeing God's face in others and ourselves.
Today, we are gathered on the internet over many miles to celebrate the new eyes that Transfiguration continually brings to our lives and the face of every person we encounter.
1Frederick Buechner in Whistling in the Dark (HarperSanFrancisco 1988), p. 120.