2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation . . . This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud . . . I have the immense joy of being a man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate, As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are, And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. He had a powerful epiphany, but what really strikes me about his experience is that God did not suddenly make him one with all those people; God did not suddenly cause all those people to shine. Reality did not change at all: Merton changed. He woke up and saw what has been true all along and is always true. “It was,” he said, “like waking from a dream of separateness.” Any sense we might feel of being separate from God or others is an illusion, a dream. And his implication is that too many people spend too much time sleepwalking, living without fully seeing Reality as it truly is.
And that comes to my mind as I sit with this extraordinary passage from Luke’s Gospel. In this story, the disciples were weighed down with sleep: the sleep of exhaustion, perhaps, but also the sleep of everyday life in this world. But in that moment, they have the grace to wake up and see Jesus shining like the sun, one with Moses and Elijah. Jesus does not become radiant just then: Jesus is always radiant with God’s light and God’s love, just as Jesus is always one with God and all of God’s children. But in that moment, spiritually awake and alive, those disciples see Reality as it truly is. And what did they do? They kept silent and in those days told no one of the things they had seen. Which is understandable. You can’t explain what they saw: you can only experience it.
Over the years of my priesthood, I have known many people who have experienced it, who have had their own moments of revelation. Often those have come around death: dying people who see departed loved ones and even Jesus; grieving people who have experienced divine Presence and deep comfort. Others have had epiphanies at unexpected times that have affected them profoundly. And I have had moments myself of almost blinding clarity, when I have seen the love of God enfolding us all in light and mercy. Such moments of intense insight do not last: maybe they can’t last. The poet T. S. Eliot wrote that “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” But enough people have had enough such moments for all of us to know what is most real and what is not.
The Apostle Paul writes today that many people, even religious people, walk around with a veil over their faces, unable or unwilling to see the truth that God is love and that all of us are one with God and each other in that love. The results of such veiled living are obviously harmful: evidence of that is unfortunately all around us and all over the news. And Paul gives a stirring wake up call, a vision of how we could be living in Christ: And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. That is beautiful, but how do we live with unveiled faces? Moments of revelation are gifts from God that we cannot make happen, but there are certainly things we can do to at least begin lifting the veil.
Let me briefly mention three of them. First, we can and should recognize how heavily the veil lies on us much of the time. If we’re going to wake up spiritually, we need to realize how often we are asleep, how frequently we live as if God were absent and as if we were not deeply connected to each other. We will enter into Lent this week, a season of self-examination, and it is a healthy practice for us to acknowledge how often we don’t even try to see the truth. The goal of that is not to feel guilty: the goal is to open our eyes and to awaken our hearts. Second, we can connect with our deep desire for God. That desire may be buried under the busyness and anxieties of life, but it’s there in all of us: we would not be here right now if it weren’t. Getting in touch with that desire, allowing ourselves to feel it, is key because the desire itself is a sure sign of God’s presence within us. Jesus tells us to seek, ask, and knock with confidence because what we most want, we already have. God’s Spirit lives in us as individuals and unites us as a community. Our desire can lead us to know that with greater assurance and joy. Third, we can all live as if God is love and as if we are one with God and each other in that love — even when we don’t feel it. That is what it means to have faith. So pray frequently, regardless of how you feel. Come to worship, regardless of how you feel. Love others as yourself, regardless of how you feel. There was a poem found at the end of World War II, written on a wall in a German concentration camp by an unknown prisoner. It reads:
I believe in the sun
even when it is not shining.
And I believe in love
even when there’s no one there.
And I believe in God
even when he is silent.
We don’t always feel God’s love and we don’t always see the light of Christ shining. But we have compelling reasons to trust that that love and that light are suffusing us and all of creation right now. And with desire and faith we can even now wake up and lift the veil — and live in the Real world.
No comments:
Post a Comment