Transfiguration: Seedling to Sunflower

We have witnessed transfigurations.  If we stop to reflect we can recall them. The story of Jesus being transfigured is a human story, the emergence if the inner, truer, emerging self in all of us.  In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye is raising five daughters in a world encroaching on the values with which he himself was raised. In reverie of his daughters’ transformation from little girls to young women, he sings the song “Sunrise, Sunset”.  He describes their transfiguration: “seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers, blossoming even as we gaze."
On my birthday just before Christmas I witnessed such a transfiguration. My granddaughter Nadia is nine now, and growing like a weed. Since infancy, she has had an interiority, into which she often retreats not suddenly, but as a slow ballet: now she’s here, now she’s there. But every once in awhile, PRESTO! She’s startled into a full run offstage. As she is aware of her own growth spurt, she is also aware of her own being called beyond the simplicity of childhood, in which her five year old sister blissfully remains. So it is a rich time, of seeing her dance not only between her secret world and the one we share with her, but also between her childhood and the world of our adulthood.
Just before Thanksgiving, I had been told by my doctor that I had an aneurism on my aorta.  I would have open-heart surgery to avoid the possibility of a sudden death. Kathy and I had gone first to Nadia’s family, to tell our daughter and her husband. Until then I’d acted as if I were 36, not 63. I’d been exceptionally active and fit. Now I was a heart patient, required to “be a slug” until life-saving surgery could be scheduled. We shared the news as positively as we could, hopeful and grateful. Nadia excused herself, saying that she had to go to the bathroom. She had learned a new ballet step, one to mask a slip so the audience would not notice. After a few minutes, her knowing mother went in to talk with her, and the two of them returned, Nadia coming into my lap, tall and lithe, hugging me gently and letting herself weep words that would not come, would not come.
A few days later Kathy and I joined our daughter’s family at a flute concert presented by Nadia’s flute teacher. She had retreated from the class, nonplussed by the idea of standing before a group and presenting. I was, much like her, twirling between my interior life, considering death, and polite attention to the social situation that I was in. The children’s music was delightful, their sweet faces more than compensating for their not-so-sweet notes. Their teacher had arranged for a few of them to read a couple of seasonal poems as an interlude to the music. The youngsters rushed through the poems, reading them like shopping lists, half inaudible. But the opening line of the second poem shocked me into recognition, not only of the poem, but of my condition. “Whose woods these are I think I know….” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (click for a link) was familiar to me, but until that moment I did not know (as I now somehow knew) as I listened to its speed-reading. Perhaps it was Frost’s prescient repeat of the closing line – “miles to go before I sleep.” I realized, as I privately contemplated the relief that death would be should it happen to me, that I too had promises to keep, to these beloved of mine in this room and my other children too. I felt, as Frost, called to life, called not to tarry before a place that is not mine to consider. I sat red-faced trying to hold back hot tears that I hoped would not come, would not come.
A month later, Nadia and her family came over to celebrate my birthday. It was a special one, of course, because we were living in the only truth, that birthdays are not promised. There were the usual gifts of thoughtful sentiment and more “happy tears” than usual. The girls each gave me a hand-drawn card, and five year old Sonja gave me a felt flower she had made for me to pin on my shirt. When it was Nadia’s turn to give me her gift, she stood empty-handed. She looked at me unblinkingly, gently smiling, swallowed twice, and began; “Whose woods are these I think I know….”
I saw her face change before me, glowing not as Jesus’ white garment, but as a girl facing womanhood, a child who until months ago had struggled to read and now, out of love for a grandfather she had noticed red-faced at a concert, had read and memorized this poem, and fought her stage fright enough to recite it, slowly, now when he could let the tears come, the month-old tears, cooled by the calm in the face of this child who could feel adult fear, and adult love.

tomorrow Thomas Merton's Bag Lady
Sunday: Compassion:our transfiguration



FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.