God's brightness

Today's readings: Genesis 15, 5-12.17-18; Philippians 3, 17 - 4, 1; Luke 9, 28-36.

The transfiguration narrative is a disclosure of God's glory, localised and made manifest in the messianic character of Jesus. Oliver Clement, a French-born Russian Orthodox theologian, writes that all icons in eastern art take their inspiration from the story of the transfiguration, allowing the light of the divine presence to be mirrored in the painted icon.

The Gospel writers and subsequent iconographers were able to offer Jesus as a new Moses, a fulfilment of promises made at Mt Sinai. St Luke concludes the story, saying that "the disciples kept silence and told no one what they had seen". The glorious presence of God disclosed in hiddenness will inevitably be rejected in the public sphere.

In a recent book The Portal of Beauty, Bruno Forte, a renowned Italian theologian and archbishop, writes: "Beauty is an event; beauty happens when the 'whole' offers itself in the fragment, and when this self-giving transcends infinite distance". This can happen, he further writes, through beauty's brightness which "lays hold of the beholder".

The Greek Fathers' understanding of the transfiguration event is that the disciples' vision of Jesus' deified human flesh revealed to them not only the glory of God, but also what it means most fully to be human. The self, once lost in desolate emptiness, is subsequently rediscovered through union with God.

This is, at the end of the day, what the Lenten journey is about. In the wake of the brokenness and loss we experience, Tabor, the mountain of the vision, discloses the other side of the coin, or the answer, to the daily seductions we are bound to face and which were revisited on the first Sunday of Lent through Christ's own experience.

The mountain, in biblical imagery, is an image of the soul as it lifts itself up in contemplation. The soul in contemplation participates in a sort of transfiguration, experiencing that loving presence of God which disperses in our hearts all temptations and all that is disorderly. The illumination of the heart, the grace that makes us divine, as Eastern theology understands it, the transfiguration of our being and of everything, are all the proclamation of a future world.

The patristic tradition unanimously interprets the Gospel narrative of the transfiguration as an anticipation of the second coming. But this second coming is not in a distant future; it becomes real for the believer in the sacraments and in what we term as spiritual experience. Everything on earth is image and shadow of the heavenly reality.

This second Sunday of Lent is all about the real meaning of the 'liturgy'. God's promises are always consolidated and find fulfilment in the space we create for celebration and adoration. A good liturgy provides the inviting space for God's disclosure. Just as a stale liturgy always generates a bored religion.

Today unforunately, and for diverse reasons, our churches are in stereotype mode where the liturgy is concerned. No wonder people are bored. The liturgy is supposed to be the vehicle of the transcendent, the 'whole' finding a home in the fragment. The liturgy is always a window that opens on the unlimited.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Romano Guardini, a great liturgist who anticipated the Council's reform, had already written in the early 1920s about what he termed "a spiritual awakening in the hearts of people", a spiritual renewal of the Church already underway thanks to the liturgical movement.

It is high time that we start asking seriously ourselves how come Catholicism has such an incomparable intellectual, cultural, mystical and spiritual heritage and yet appears so stagnant and so lacking in self-confidence. We need to go back to the mountain vision and to let God's brightness 'lay hold of the beholder'.