There’s a wonderful novel that just came out called Lying Awake. It’s about a cloistered nun in California, who has visions, ecstatic religious visions, visions so intense that she has begun to write poetry about them. But she also has fierce headaches that attack her painfully, and seizures that leave her exhausted for days, and that are getting worse. She eventually consults a doctor, outside the cloister, who finds that she has temporal lobe epilepsy, and that an operation can cure her headaches and seizures, but it may also cure her of her visions. So she has a choice: She can stay in touch with what she believes is her spectacular vision of God’s presence, or she can be here, without pain, in the seemingly black-and-white world that the rest of us live in.
Today’s readings, of course, are about spectacular visions, but more importantly, about how we react to them and hold onto them. We have the flaming torch passing between the hacked-up animals in the first reading, God literally signing the contract between God and Abram, and perhaps even more dazzling, the gospel of the transfiguration on the mountain. It’s clearly an important passage, because it’s in all three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and scholars have no problem explaining the theological importance of it. That explanation goes something like this.
The disciples have struggled for chapters with Jesus’s identity, and before they turn to Jerusalem for the final chapters of Jesus’s life they get this glimpse of who he really is. He has seemed so fascinating but in many ways so ordinary, walking along the same dusty roads they do, and now, they see this as part of the answer. Not only is he the fulfillment of every prophecy, as represented by the great prophets Moses and Elijah, but he is even greater than that. For one moment, they see Jesus the way God sees Jesus, not the way they have seen him all along. They see his real identity before heading off with him for the crucifixion.
But here’s the real question: having seen this incredibly spectacular sight, whether it was in a prayer experience, or whether they were wide awake — why didn’t it make things clear to them forever? Wouldn’t you have lived your whole life differently having seen a sight like this?
But here in Luke’s gospel, and in all the other accounts of the transfiguration, that doesn’t happen, they don’t quite understand what it is they’re seeing, they all come down the mountain, and in this gospel, if you skip ahead to a part you don’t hear today, a mere ten verses later, you find the same disciples arguing about who is the greatest among them, pretty stupid and petty, considering. And just a few chapters later, you find Peter outside the Sanhedrin, denying that he was ever even a follower of the man he saw transfigured before his eyes. So after this moment that should by all rights have changed their lives, reality sets in.
And there, we have our life in a nutshell.
Because this situation is not so foreign to us, not just the failure, but the transfiguration, too. Because we have divine moments, where we see things clearly, and then we forget all about them and “put things in perspective” and get back to life as we know it. You maybe haven’t had a vision like this of Jesus transfigured and glowing white, but the point is that this moment is one in which all of a sudden the disciples saw things the way God sees things.
You have probably looked at one of your children and realized that they were not just some little person you liked a lot, but an incredible gift that God put on this earth for you, a descendant of yours the same way we are descendants of Abraham. Or maybe you looked at some sick person, and realized that that person, far from being unfortunate, maybe had the time and the closeness to God that you’ll never be able to achieve, and maybe you began to figure out that God and suffering are mysteriously intertwined. Maybe you suddenly saw all your plans for the future as relatively insignificant compared with whether you could be reconciled with those you have left behind. Maybe you saw a stranger, a poor mother, a condemned man, and seen the face of Jesus, or even your own face.
We have these feelings, for an instant, and it’s times like that we see people and ourselves the way God sees them. And then we lose it. We come down the mountain and then reality sets in or what we think is reality. The real reality is what we thought we saw. But we start to live our lives the same old way again, because it’s so hard to hang onto those moments when things were so clear.
Lent is the time when we try to hang onto our visions, to remember them, to live them out, to see where they might take us. Moments when we see things through God’s eyes aren’t strange sidelights in our life, gone in a moment. They are life. The first moment that the vision comes to us can’t last forever, even the nun in the book I mentioned can have hers come to an end. But do they end? Only if we live as if they do.