From the Pastor - 'The Transfiguration'

A weekly column by Father George Rutler

Transfiguration by Lorenzo Lotto (1510-12)
Pinacoteca Comunale, Recanati

Churches dedicated to Our Saviour traditionally celebrate the Transfiguration on August 6 as their annual parish feast. The catastrophic earthquake in Japan recalls the force of the bomb there on the Feast of the Transfiguration in 1945 when the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted Vishnu: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” A different kind of power radiated from the transfigured Christ: “God from God, Light from Light.” The Church enters this radiance in every sacrament, and retells the mystery in the Gospel proclamation for the Second Sunday of Lent.

In the Transfiguration, Moses the Lawgiver and Elijah the Prophet flank Christ. Representing the life of the intellect — practical and prophetic, social and scientific — they worship Him as their source and inspiration. “The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world” (John 1: 9). A man whose mind is without God is out of his mind. Memory of that kept St. Peter sane the rest of his life: “And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount” (2 Peter 1:18).

As a child, I enjoyed the early television puppet show, “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” so different from the TV fare in our present coarsened culture. As the best children’s entertainments are aimed at adults through the children, the puppets' fans included John Steinbeck, James Thurber, Adlai Stevenson and Orson Welles. One day the absent-minded witch Beulah threw down her broom and announced that she was abandoning magic to embrace the wonderful world of empiricism. That is a good thing to do, but empiricism, or knowledge from sensory experience, is not wonderful if it does not connect mental brilliance with the “Light from Light.” The wrong use of the intellect leads to death, not life.

In The Tempest, Shakespeare’s Prospero also repents of magic at the end, but only after he has dissolved spirits into thin air. Then he tells his daughter Miranda and her fiancé Ferdinand: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” That enchanting empirical perception of the brevity of life is also melancholic for its lack of supernatural light. In the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah disappeared, not banished by Christ like magic, but subsumed into his eternal radiance. This dumbfounded Peter, James and John, until our Saviour touched them with his human hand and led them back down the mountain. Eusebius of Caesarea calculated that this happened forty days before the Passion. The Church walks with Christ for forty days in Lent, with the light of Heaven in memory and the shadow of the Cross in prospect. This is God’s way of instructing the intellect that victory over death comes through death, not in spite of it. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

Father George W. Rutler is the pastor of the Church of our Saviour in New York City. His latest book, Cloud of Witnesses: Dead People I Knew When They Were Alive, is available from Crossroads Publishing.