Transfiguration as Mystical
O Lover,
The gospel reading at the head of the second week of Lent was the Marcan take on the transfiguration of the Christ (9:2-10). Ever within Your Presence, whether with or without my awareness, I long here for this luminous pericope to become even more the mystical milestone that it is.
At the outset, there are the perennial and iconic images which would punctuate subsequent Christian spirituality for the duration: mountain (e.g., John Climacus), light (e.g., Jn 1:1-13), cloud (e.g., The Cloud of Unknowing), the relentless transit of chrónos. These archetypal images alone hint of the mystical, of intuited and immediate awareness of You.
The text also points to the Judaic antecedents of Your epiphany on the mountain. Beyond concrete events in time and places in space, persons of faith are here remembered via orality and text. The appearance of Moses and Elias exemplify the concrete tap-rootage of Your Self-revelation now stunningly splendored in the Christ. The encounter traditionally set on Mt. Tabor was no mere hallucination, gnostic or etherial, but rather a glimpse into Your Self-disclosure encompassing all having being. Stated otherwise, the DNA of the transfiguration account included the twice-named mount of Moses (Sinai) and Elijah (Horeb). Mysticism and heílsgeschichte (“salvation history”) are decidedly not antithetical!
Then there is the way that the entire episode harks of boundary territory between the finite and the infinite. Within the subsequent tradition of Jesus many terms would be used for aspects of this hinterland: Angela of Foligno’s “the world is pregnant with God,” Merton’s ubiquitous “gate of heaven,” Celtic “thin places,” permeable membrane, the porous veil, pan-sacramentality, translucency, liminal land. The transfiguration text exposes the fructive nexus between created finitude and You, O Lover, who are Uncreated Reality, and the bridge betwixt is Your Christ.
But it is when Christology becomes thoroughly wedded to anthropology, indeed all creation; when the Christ is allowed to encompass “everyone,” indeed, “everything”; when “the entire earth is full of [Your] glory” (Is 6:3); that the Marcan text really raises a profoundly mystical song. Within that larger vision all upon which You have bestowed being is seen to be infused by and rendered immanent of You. The Christ, to say nothing of Peter (blatheringly “not realizing what he was saying” [Lk 9:33]), is prefigurement/portent/harbinger of all of us. In our text we glimpse how the mystical arc inexorably and ubiquitously bends toward Unítas Déi. Not only historical personage, the transfigured one is thus seen as a fore-glimpse of the biggest possible picture, the Mystérium (Eph 1:10) anchored in Your Sacred Heart.
Finally, in Mark (a la Mt 17) Jesus instructs Peter, James, and John not to tell anyone what they had seen “until the son of man should have risen from the dead” (9:9), words which leave them puzzled. The Christ is here implying that the road to the dóxa, the dazzling, the beatific, the rendering permanent of the “mountain fever” for which impetuous Peter wishes, will pass through the Passion’s darkness before it can reach the Resurrection’s light. With a nod to C. S. Lewis, permanent squatting on the blissful heights replete with its goodies of transport, immediacy, timelessness, splendor, and ecstasy is simply not allowed. Thus, at least for now, even delighting in You alone must needs find expression in the soon descent to the slog of life immanently to [re-]emerge in the valley below.
