August 6, the feast of the Transfiguration, is one that comes and goes very quickly in the excitement of the Summer — so much so, that it is often overlooked. But it has a number of important lessons that we must not ignore — especially in these difficult times. Dom Gueranger, as usual, gives a fine account of the feast itself — its liturgical history and meaning, its relationship with the Epiphany, and the like. St. Matthew’s Gospel gives a fine account of the actual event: “And after six days Jesus taketh unto him Peter and James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart: And he was transfigured before them. And his face did shine as the sun: and his garments became white as snow. And behold there appeared to them Moses and Elias talking with him. And Peter answering, said to Jesus: Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles, one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. And as he was yet speaking, behold a bright cloud overshadowed them. And lo, a voice out of the cloud, saying: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: hear ye him. And the disciples hearing, fell upon their face, and were very much afraid. And Jesus came and touched them: and said to them, Arise, and fear not. And they lifting up their eyes saw no one but only Jesus. And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying: Tell the vision to no man, till the Son of man be risen from the dead.” Ss. Mark and Luke recount it in very similar terms, as does St. Peter in his second epistle.
There are a great many customs associated with the feast throughout the Christian world. But most of us to-day reside in places where its public observance is muted, to say the least. But apart from being an interesting episode in the life of Christ, what real significance does it have for us now?
As with the Epiphany, the Transfiguration was and is an eruption of the Heavenly into this fallen world of ours. It is a reminder that beyond this land of sin and shadow there is a higher, greater, truer reality, wherein the Holy Will of God is as joyfully and naturally complied with by its happy denizens as we comply with our own down here.
In the here and now, the number of evils facing us seem almost limitless. Our leadership in Church and State often seem like the blind leading the blind — and often appear to mix ignorance with malice. Our political rulers may be sleepwalking into nuclear war, while our culture drowns in the sort of disgusting blasphemy epitomised by the recent Olympic opening. Our media peddle filth, while our education industry strives to turn out mindless robots babbling lies and ready to turn violent at a moment’s notice. Wokery creeps on, injecting its poison into revered institution after revered institution. The world is filled with warfare, hunger, and disease.
Add to those unpleasantries particular to our time, the perennial annoyances of the human condition. Every sin, however dreadful, has been with us since the Fall. Our wills are weak, our intellects clouded, and we are inclined to evil. We may marvel at the natural, built, artistic, and intangible heritage that is the common patrimony of mankind — and then meditate upon how much of it we have destroyed, often enough while others have been creating. In our own personal lives we can see this at work; no matter how we may strive for virtue, we always have something to confess — and a great many of us do not bother to strive. It is a very dark picture and seen in these terms might well drive one to despair.
But, although the darkness does not comprehend it, the light still shines in darkness. Coming as it did not long before Our Lord’s Passion, the Transfiguration was like a shot of light bursting into the gloom. It continues to symbolise all of the very many eruptions of Heaven into the murk of our world, regardless of Popes and presidents, famines, pandemics, and wars.
Where may we find these eruptions? Quite a few places, really, in space and time. The first is at the reception of the Holy Eucharist, in whatever valid rite of the Church one receives it, and in either or both species. Once we have taken Him into us, He takes us, albeit for only a short period, into Himself. This small bit of time is as close to Heaven as most of us can get, this side of the grave. Let us profit from it in just those terms. Running second, of course, is Eucharistic Adoration. The prayers and devotions the Church provides for us — the Sacred Heart, Precious Blood, Rosary, and so on are all ways to prolong our prayer outside the Sacred Liturgy itself — and also ways of bringing that Heavenly light into our homes and our lives. So too are keeping as well as we can the feasts of the Church’s calendar, both in the liturgy and in our homes — as well as with our neighbours if we are fortunate enough to live in an area where public observance of some or all these feasts is done. Beyond that, every shrine, every basilica, every monastery, and indeed every parish church is an outpost of Heaven — each reflecting it in a different way. In a word, each of us can, every day, savour a bit of that light that shown down from Mount Tabor.
The spiritual benefits of looking at things in this light are obvious; the more time one attempts to spend with Our Lord and Lady and the “Blessed Company of Heaven,” the closer one can become in ths life to that goal which we all share — or ought to. This is the way we are made fit to be permanent residents in that realm — that is to say, how we become Saints. But there are more earthly and immediate benefits as well.
Most of us have read stories of various martyrs and other heroes in concentration camps, the gulags, or prisons of various sorts. One of the amazing things about so many of these great figures is that they were able to endure the sight of horrors, tortures, and the general darkness around them in such great spirit. Those who left us writings make it clear that it was because these things made them focus on the eternal — as did Richard Lovelace when imprisoned by the Puritans in 1642: “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage: Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage.”
For those of us not imprisoned for the Faith, but nevertheless constantly weighed down by the evils earlier mentioned, we too may “transfigure” our daily lives, so to speak, by remembering our final end and attempting to see in our everyday life the reflections of Heaven which in fact abound all around us — if we but allow ourselves to see them. Arthur Machen described this sort of state very poetically in The Great Return, his novel about the Holy Grail coming into what was then the modern world:
Old men felt young again, eyes that had been growing dim now saw clearly, and saw a world that was like Paradise, the same world, it is true, but a world rectified and glowing, as if an inner flame shone in all things, and behind all things.
And the difficulty in recording this state is this, that it is so rare an experience that no set language to express it is in existence. A shadow of its raptures and ecstasies is found in the highest poetry; there are phrases in ancient books telling of the Celtic saints that dimly hint at it; some of the old Italian masters of painting had known it, for the light of it shines in their skies and about the battlements of their cities that are founded on magic hills. But these are but broken hints.”
… if there be paradise in meat and in drink, so much the more is there paradise in the scent of the green leaves at evening and in the appearance of the sea and in the redness of the sky; and there came to me a certain vision of a real world about us all the while, of a language that was only secret because we would not take the trouble to listen to it and discern it.
Because, you see, despite the visible darkness all around us, this world belongs as much to God as does Heaven. It is not our final home, nor can it give us lasting happiness; but it can give us hints from time to time of the grandeur and beauty that lie beyond it, and those hints in turn can brings us joy, even as do nostalgia and hope for the future — which really are both more about a yearning for Heaven than either antiquarianism or Science Fiction. In the end, the feast of the Transfiguration reminds us, in our routine of worry and doubt, of Sam Gamgee’s discovery in Lord of the Rings:
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.