Being transfigured

I’ve had the good fortune to climb a lot of mountains in my life. Low rounded mountains in the East with muddy, steep, washed-out trails; high volcanic mountains in the West where I had to go with guides and ropes and crampons. If there’s a high place available, I like to figure out how to go up it. There will always be a part of me that regrets any mountain I wanted to climb but didn’t, or the summits I couldn’t complete because of weather or mishap. There’s a lot that’s wonderful about being up high and seeing out over the landscape, when you’ve sweated and toiled your way up to get there. Of course I’ve had plenty of miserable, fearful times on mountains, times of altitude sickness, cold, getting lost, what have you. But mostly the mountains are a place I find solace, inspiration, healing. One of the many reasons I’m glad to be back here in the West.

On this Sunday in the church year, we all get a little time together on the mountaintop: the gospel story of the Transfiguration takes us there. All three synoptic gospels include this story, so it’s clearly an important one. It shows the disciples (and us) who Jesus really is, a glimpse of his divinity. It also tells us something of our own response to that revelation – seen through the behavior of Peter, who’s kind of our stand-in in the gospel stories. But what we in the Western church sometimes forget is something the Eastern Orthodox church teaches: this story tells us about what God intends for us, the process that God is working in us even now. Transfiguration is not just about Jesus; it’s what God is drawing us all toward.

Jesus and his close friends go up a mountain, but it’s not the first time he’s gone up mountains. The devil takes him up the mountain in his 40 days of temptations, to show him all the kingdoms of the earth. Jesus preaches the famous Sermon on the Mount from, of course, the mountain. He retires numerous times to a mountain to pray and commune alone with God. Every gospel has Jesus feeding the multitudes on a mountain. And at the end of the story, after his resurrection, Jesus will ascend from the mountain. There are a lot of mountains in Israel, and Jesus seems particularly drawn to going up them, each and every one of them. (I knew I loved this guy.) So on this trip he takes Peter, James, and John with him, ‘up a high mountain.’ And there he is transfigured, suffused with radiant light, dazzling the disciples’ eyes, with Moses and Elijah standing alongside and speaking with him. If they had any doubt before this that Jesus was something special, they can’t doubt it now.

And yet of course the disciples can’t make head or tail of what they’re seeing. Here is a vision they did not expect. Here is the presence of the holy, Jesus alongside other great figures of the faith. Peter’s first instinct is to set up camp. He’s convinced that this powerful epiphany is for them alone, so he wants to build some booths and stay. For a moment, he tries to control the experience: This will become a place of pilgrimage, a shrine, he thinks, and we’ll be your temple servants and this is so great, we’ve got the inside dope on what’s really true about you. But a voice from heaven interrupts him: stop, Peter, this is my Son, the Beloved – listen to him.

Of course they fall to the ground in fear. But Jesus comes and touches them, saying, don’t be afraid – get up! That brief moment of thinking they were in control and understood the whole thing – gone. They are overwhelmed all over again.

And then the bright light goes away and they go back down the mountain, because that is where the work is waiting for them, and Jesus tells them to keep this vision quiet to themselves because the resurrection, the real revelation, is still to come. There’s still a lot of work to do. People are waiting for them at the bottom, and when they get to the crowds there will be arguments, and failure, and high anxiety – the crowds will all be mad at the disciples because they can’t heal a boy with a demon, and Jesus will have to wade in and sort them out yet again. They’re not there yet. There is still a long way to go.

And here’s where the story finds us. Not only do we see Jesus as the Christ, transfigured and radiant, a sign of how he is and will be at his resurrection and ascension; not only do we recognize in ourselves our paradoxical impulses of fear and desire to control; but here is a sort of roadmap for where we are going in the spiritual life. We are on this spiritual path not because we are aiming to be better citizens, more moral people. We are on this path to be transfigured, to be brought, ourselves, into God. And we have a long, long ways to go.

Maybe this feels startling to hear, that our aim is to be become like God. The early church called it divinization, part of the process of salvation. For whatever reason, it is something the western church mostly left behind and downplayed, but it remains central to the theology of the eastern Orthodox church. One of the most notable theologians to outline it was Gregory of Nyssa, one of the three we now call the Cappadocian fathers, 4th century bishops and writers. Gregory said that as we are created in the image of God, our purpose is to attain union with God, to be God-like. Our purpose, our essence, is to ceaselessly stretch ourselves, climb from height to height, go from glory to glory towards that union. That language is there in our collect prayer today: Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be… changed into his likeness from glory to glory.  God is constantly working to change us into what we were created to be: his likeness. Reshaping us into the character and nature of God.

There’s a Greek term for this, epekstasis – a word that encompasses striving, stretching, climbing, expanding. But the process continues throughout eternity. We never actually get there. Every step we take up the mountain leads toward a higher step. There are always more summits to climb. Our spiritual life is one of perpetual desire and longing – and yet, also of joy, because in every moment we are receiving God into ourselves as well. We are fed and we are longing all at the same time. We never get there; we are always on the road; and yet we are feasting all the way.

In just a few days we will begin the season of Lent – a season of preparation and expectation, like the season of Advent. But it’s also a season of attempts at improvement and purification, and penitence for all the ways we have messed up along the path. There’s some good in that, of course. A little honesty is essential for our growth, a little clear-eyed looking at our own faults and failings. If you haven’t done much of that lately, this is a good time for a reality check with a trusted confidante, or your journal, or the practice of private confession. Lord knows we all get lost in the weeds of our fear and control issues – we need to move up higher to see our temptations clearly.

But that clarity isn’t the only reason for climbing mountains. Lent is a good time to reengage with our longing, to take steps to move toward what we love. To stop all the busyness and distraction and mental junk food and get in touch with what you are longing for. Go for where you find peace. Seek out what truly feeds you.

And if part of you feels like you are having to do this all the time, every year, remember this: we never get to the top of the mountain. We keep climbing anyway. Gregory of Nyssa said that the soul always feels like a beginner, no matter how far advanced we may get on the spiritual path. It is endless.  The climb itself is life, from glory to glory. And God is with us, every step of the way. So amen for that.