Mark 9:2-10 and Peter 1;16-19
What I realize sometimes when I read the gospel is exactly how much I need it.
Grumpy on the Transfiguration. Out of sorts.
On the feast of the one of the most glorious things that ever happened, a moment of dazzling beauty and life, I’m moody and irritable and low on energy.
The light that comes pouring down doesn’t come pouring down because these three particular men are really good meditators or theologians or in any way special. The world just suddenly opens up and all this dazzling beauty comes rushing in.
But that’s OK.
The problem with basing faith on feeling is that it puts responsibility in the wrong place. It assumes that faith is something that I can make happen, through discipline or hard work or purity of intention, as I’m some sort of spiritual athlete, when faith is a gift, given by God, unearned, unsought. The disciples don’t produce the transfiguration. They fall on their faces before it. They don’t plan it, don’t arrange it. The light that comes pouring down doesn’t come pouring down because these three particular men are really good meditators or theologians or in any way special. The world just suddenly opens up and all this dazzling beauty comes rushing in. The disciples hardly know what hit them, and that’s how prayer sometimes is, when it seems somehow to “work,” when something happens in it. What we realize then is that the joy or the insight have nothing to do with us—that the very condition of this sweetness is exactly that it exceeds us.