Last week, I was at a meeting of some clergy. There’s a lot I’m not going to tell you about this meeting, because I feel the need of protecting the identities of the people involved. One thing I will assure you is that no one else here today was at this meeting. In fact, they weren’t all Catholic, so what I’m going to say isn’t singling out any particular denomination. It was depressing. The energy level was low, people drifted in, it took forever to get started, even the few things that needed to get settled took forever, people weren’t even all that friendly. Worst of all for me, they’d promised lunch for noon and it didn’t show up until 1:30, which was when the meeting was supposed to be over in the first place.
So this was a scene that was calculated to frustrate someone like me who is used to the fast-paced and sometimes intelligent world of publishing. In the midst of this meeting, however, when my faith in God’s good judgment was fading a bit, there was a brief moment when one of the clergy at that meeting spoke for about a minute about his motivations for working with his congregation, what he wanted them to be able to experience, why he worked so hard for this group.
For that moment, in place of a room full of people I’d found unimpressive who couldn’t even get a lunch on the table I saw a group of ministers, people who maybe were in fact God’s army here on earth, working with a generosity and a patience that maybe I didn’t have, and accomplishing things that perhaps I would never see.
Just like that, of course, it was over, and everyone in that room returned to normal. Or perhaps, it was just my ability to see them that returned to its usual state.
Today is a day when once again we hear one of the gospel stories of the transfiguration. It appears in all three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, so this experience and this story was clearly an important one in the earliest tradition of the disciples. In each gospel, it appears slightly different in its details, but the upshot is clear: for a moment, an itinerant teacher, a prophet perhaps, a healer, a miracle worker, but a human clearly, became in their eyes something far greater, and the real significance of his presence and who he was became blindingly clear to them.
Moments like that do not happen to us on a mountaintop, or quite so spectacularly, they do not come naturally to us, nor are they easy to hang onto. Like the disciples, who in many ways didn’t distinguish themselves even after this spectacular vision, we don’t often act as if we’ve seen the truth, and our memories are short. But despite all those caveats, we know that moments like this do happen to us as well, when our ability to see ourselves and others around us, suddenly becomes remarkably clear. We recognize in these brief moments that our usual ability to experience the reality of things is imperfect, and often totally wrong. It is imperfect because our vision is shaped by our lives: What we value, what we pursue, what we spend our time thinking about and desiring. All those form our ability to come to a true judgment of who others really are.
One reason we hear this gospel of the transfiguration during Lent is because Lent is our time to do the sorting-out work, the hard discipline that it takes to see reality underneath how we usually see ourselves, our lives, other people. All these Lenten traditions of prayer, and fasting, and generosity, and a new routine and spiritual practice, they’re all intended to help us separate illusion from reality. You go to the desert not to get away from it all, but to confront reality, see it plain, without distraction. We’re meant to see during Lent what sorts of people we honor, and why we honor them, and whether, if we see them clearly, they are worth our honor, what sorts of people we want ourselves to turn into, and whether, if we see that clearly, they are truly what we want for ourselves, what things we spend our time chasing after, and whether, if we see that clearly, it is truly as desirable as it usually seems.
We started this Lent, not with a vision of Jesus turning into blinding light, but with a little transfiguration of ourselves, with ashes on our foreheads, people marked with a sign of their own humanity, in need once again of some reconstruction from the ground up. We don’t often look that way, but during Lent, that’s us. Part of that reconstruction is doing the work we need to see ourselves clearly, to look around this world and see evil where we often see goodness, to see God where we could never usually see his touch. If we accomplish that in Lent even for moment, that moment of light is more than worth the climb up the mountain.