Transfiguration: What Sticks?

In a final look at today’s Good Story of the Transfiguration in Luke 9:28-36 (Click here for a link), let’s consider what sticks. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a popular book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference that mentioned “stickiness”: what makes a story a good one is that something sticks to us after it is over. We remember something. We are forever changed, even if only in a subtle way. The friends of Jesus had seen him transfigured, and they would never be the same. One of the purposes of the nightly Examen, even a moment of reflection as you are falling asleep on the events of your day, is to reinforce or strengthen the memory of those things that stood out. Some people use “journaling” to do this, writing down their thoughts and reflections of the day, and in doing so writing them on their hearts.

Here is a powerful such description by Thomas Merton of a transfigurational moment that changed his life, a doorway through which he entered a world of empathy that he never left. Thanks to Bill Hickey for sending this as we began looking at transfiguration.  It is set off by his seeing, really seeing, a bag lady on the street in Cincinnati.  Look how it stuck!

I was suddenly overwhelmed with a realization that I loved all these people,
That they were mine and I theirs….
It was like waking from a dream of separateness,
Of spurious self-isolation in a special world,
The world of renunciation and supposed holiness.
The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream….

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy
That I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form
In the words, "Thank God that I am like other men (and women)."

I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own.
It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone,
And when I am alone they are not "they," but my own self.
There are no strangers! The gate of heaven is everywhere.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts,
The depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach,
The core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes.
If only they could see themselves as they really are.
If only we could see each other that way all the time,
There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed….
But how do you tell people that they are walking around shining like the sun?
I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down
And worship each other.

From Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Please consider one last reading of this Good Story before we go on tomorrow to look at words of life from an unexpected place.  Apply your senses. Get into the story. But do so as one of Jesus friends. Be Peter or James or John. You look up after the brightness fades and see that it is only Jesus there. He comes down and joins you. How do you find that you are looking at him having seen him in his full glory; how you feel about him, and about yourself? What sticks?


Tomorrow: returning to desire and will with a word from Death Row
Tuesday: the two feet of the Lenten Journey: Examen and Imagining the Good Story
Wednesday: The gift of Sudden; the gift of gradual: doors within doors



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