Transfiguration Everyday

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out—no guarantees
in this life.
But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

-William Stafford

It was one of the most beautiful days I have ever seen—at a wisp below 80º, certainly an unusual day for the Central California Coast in the middle of February. The light was bright but gentle, without any of the haze or harshness one finds in summer. And the waves, large and wintry, ran deeply into the beach and glistened in the full winter sun. Having spent many of the best days of my life in Santa Cruz, including summers as a boy and a sabbatical year after my time as Provincial, I felt at home in this place. I recognized the smell of the eucalyptus mixing with the slight taste of salt from the ocean, and I saw much that was familiar, and yet, somehow also different: the old hamburger stand, where I would walk with my sister, Elizabeth, to get a 12¢ burgers now sells Hawaiian lunches, instead of burgers; the wonderful candy store, shaped like a windmill, where we would get homemade peanut brittle, is now a store for curios, though the windmill remains; and the old Surf Motel has become apartments, with little changed except the color of the paint and the name on the sign.

What seemed most permanent, however, besides the sea itself, was the retreat house that anchored the community, and first drew my parents to this neighborhood. Villa Maria del Mar—the house of Mary of the Sea—sits overlooking the ocean on one side and East Cliff Drive on the other. Run by the Sisters of the Holy Names, its tan, clapboard front seems unaltered since my parents first went there the year I was born.

And its simple little chapel—where we had attended Mass while on vacation, where my brother had been married and his two children baptized, where my father had fixed the bell stand and helped repair the old wooden steps (now replaced by concrete), where my mother would come to daily Mass after my father’s death and then join the Sisters for breakfast—the chapel seemed as it had always been, immediately and profoundly right. This was the place we were meant to be, the place we were called to remember my sister, Elizabeth, and to say goodbye to her with prayer, and tears, and family. For here she had been happier than anyplace else on earth, and here we had grown close as siblings and as friends.

Looking around, as my family gathered, it seemed as though all time was contained in this moment: I saw my niece with her son, Colin, and her new baby, Logan, and my nephew with his fiancee. There was my older sister, Patty, and her three daughters, as well as my two brothers—who had grown up together and remained close friends and combatants much of their lives. And there, to my surprise, was my parents’ oldest friend, Tom Cooney, arriving from San Francisco with a friend whom he had asked to drive him down. All things change, it seems—or perhaps, it is that all things remain. In that moment, it felt as though both of these ideas were true; as though I were witnessing, in this time of sadness and loss, a great revelation about the nature of joy, and grace, and timeless hope. It felt that the world was opening, and we were invited to behold the powerful beauty that sits at its heart. Invited, that is, to a moment of transfiguration.

When Jesus takes his disciple up the mountain of Transfiguration, it is not to deny the identity they have come to know, not to take them out of the world into heaven. It is not to give them a peek behind his mask, or let them in on the secret that none of the “human stuff”—i.e., the suffering, the loss, the joy, the hope—is real. On the contrary, when they look up and “no longer [see] anyone but Jesus alone with them,” it is to remind them that both realities exist side-by-side: that within the human Jesus the incarnate God is always present, the two inexorably united through love. And more than that, it is to assure them that both realities also exist in every one of us, in every woman or man who shares the identity of Jesus, both as wounded pilgrim and as beloved child of the Most High God. The Transfiguration—which happens once when the disciples are empowered to see the full reality of Jesus—happens over and over again, whenever we experience a moment of true vision, whenever we see the full reality of that kingdom which Jesus proclaims and which is present at the heart of this world, and in the heart of every one of us.

We are not meant to live in a realm of timeless glory—not meant to pitch our tents on the mountain with Moses and Elijah. Rather, we are called to climb down the mountain with Jesus, into this place of suffering and death. Here, in the painful grace of our humanity, in our journey with him through cross and tomb, through sorrow and loss, we are asked to have hope that even our struggles are charged with the glory of God. We are asked to believe that somehow, despite all that our wounded world tells us, nothing will be lost, nothing will remain unrevealed. For all is, at last, transfigured, its beauty and grace revealed to us, not as an alternative to this world, but at its very heart. 

- Fr. John Whitney, SJ