The Eight Day, a New Creation
“The Eighth Day, a New Creation”
Transfiguration Sunday, Year C, March 3, 2019
Exodus 34:29-35 Luke 9:28-36(37-43)
First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint, Idaho
Pastor Andy Kennaly
“Theophany” is a fancy word which describes “a visible manifestation of a deity.” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theophany). God becomes visible to humans. Theophany comes from Theo, which is Latin for God, but based on even older Greek for God. Also, the last part, p-h-a-n-y, has to do with appearance. The word Epiphany, which we usually translate as God-with-us, is all about God revealing. Theophany is God appearance, and we can participate if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, if we’ve opened our hearts and quieted our minds. The veil comes down and God’s glory shines.
I had an interesting experience last winter up on the ski mountain. A couple weeks after returning from an intensive Centering Prayer Retreat in New York, I had worked most of the day in town, but since it was such a sunny day, I needed to get out and do something active, so I headed up the hill. Before the lifts closed, I only got three or four runs in as the sun worked its way down behind the summit of Schweitzer Mountain. As the afternoon got closer to its closing, the long shadow cast along the ridge kept reaching further east. I’d ski a run in the sunshine, and as the shadow moved, my next run would be one or two runs east from there. That way I was in the sun for each run, just ahead of the shadow. Eventually the village was in the twilight shade, and I stopped up above, catching the last light of the final run.
As I stood there on the slope, looking out across the valley, seeing the lake, the Purcell Trench, the Selkirk, Monarch, Purcell, and Cabinet Mountains, foothills to the Rockies, and pondering the vast geologic time scales this region has participated in as ice age Lake Missoula came and went with cataclysmic flooding, I stood there for several minutes just looking, and feeling the sun’s warmth as that glorious late afternoon went out in style.
As I stood there, I calmed my mind and had a mystical experience on the mountain, which is another way of saying my afternoon prayer became experiential. The prayer dropped from my head into my heart and I asked God to show me what the view looks like when seen through the eyes of the heart. Soon I noticed that I was not alone in my prayer, but the trees were joining me. The entire valley and all the mountains ringing in, like some Psalm coming alive, and we were all connected in praising God together. As my eyes perceived the view through my heart, the light changed, temporarily. Everything took on a radiant hue, like those old paintings where people and angels have that bright disk painted around their head. Everything glowed and its as if the blue sky was no longer a limiting factor, like a ceiling, but the earth itself opened up and the veil between heaven and earth was permeable.
At first, I felt amazed and honored to experience such unity and community and communion in a moment unlike any other I’d had up to then. My heart was the center of this spiritual perception, and in the background, my mind questioned how people could settle for any less, how people could prefer religion that externalized faith and prescribed lists of behavior, when really, the fullness of love is what truly defines, fills, and inspires devotion, awe, and wonder. I remember thinking, “Oh, this is what the Psalmists are talking about when they say the trees are clapping their hands!”
In this vision I also felt tension between unity with all things and an individual identity, and I pondered how it is that we define words like, “you” and “me” as if we are actually separate, because we’re not, and yet we are. I noticed a great sorrow arrive, and on the one hand I wanted to stay unified and connected with this vision as the entire valley danced in joy, and yet I felt myself as a distinction, as somehow involved in “otherness.” In other words, I felt very joyful being alive and connected with everything, and at the same time, sorrowful that I had to experience this vision as a person, a created being, and simply by being “me” I could not be in the fullness of everything else. On the one hand, unity with all creation singing praises, on the other hand, simply by being alive carries a distinct weight or a burden that can’t hold the fullness.
This vision only lasted a couple minutes, if that, but it changed my life, deepened my perspectives, increased a sense of mystery and love, validated the power of Centering Prayer and spiritual disciplines, and it seemed to take my faith to the next level, whatever that means.
Later that week I finally finished a book I’d been procrastinating with for months, and providentially, the section I’d put off for so long actually made better sense after this vision. It’s as if I wasn’t supposed to read it earlier, for now I had a new perspective through this encounter on the mountain.
Cynthia Bourgeault writes in her book, “The Heart of Centering Prayer” (The Heart of Centering Prayer, Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice, Shambhala Press, Boulder, 2016 pp. 193-198) about the edges of consciousness, moving from mind-perception to heart-perception, and she mentions that sorrow I felt by quoting a medieval author and the book, “The Cloud of Unknowing” written in the fourteenth century. That anonymous author says,
“All men have reason for sorrow, but most particularly does he have cause for sorrow who knows and feels that he is. Compared to this, all other sorrows are but games.” (195). Cynthia unpacks this, saying this “perfect sorrow […] is actually a felt sense of awareness that you are yourself the veil that hides the paradise you seek. In an excruciating catch-22, you feel with your entire being how the very sword stroke that delivers you into individual consciousness and identity simultaneously separates you from the whole. As you explore this strange, unfamiliar territory with your heart cognition (it is inaccessible to your mind alone), you come to actually sense the space – feel the weight – that your created being takes up in the radiant and flowing field of divine love. You sense yourself […] as a ‘lump,’ with volume and turbidity, and the result is almost always a sharp stab of sorrow. But it is not a personal sorrow, but rather a deeply luminous and transpersonal appreciation of the ‘cost’ of divine love. […] It is holy ground being traversed here: painful but purifying. For you are indeed standing at the outer boundary of consciousness itself, at least as far as it can be borne in finite flesh […]. Very few Christian writers, even at the mystical outposts, have explored this terrain, and when they do, they are almost always misunderstood. [This] “phenomenology of consciousness [at the] key transition point where it shifts from brain-centered to heart-centered cognition [… is] the kind of deeply intuitive knowing that is the fruit of committed contemplative practice.”
Today as I share this personal story of a vision on the mountain seen through the heart, we also read scripture, and with centuries between them, two encounters with God, perceived through human senses, recorded in scripture as Moses on Mt. Sinai and Jesus, Peter, James, and John also up on a Mountain experiencing God’s Presence. These Theophanies have effects. As these stories share, they use images to express the differences, the before/during/after parts of these encounters. Moses is asked to cover his face, it’s so brightly radiant; Jesus gets all shiny, his clothing dazzling white.
Notice how Luke introduces this scene, saying, “Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed…” A couple quick things with this, both of them pointing beyond themselves. The first is that part about eight days. This prompts our spiritual imagination to remember the Creation story, and God creating during those mythical 6 days, resting on the 7th. Many early Christians considered Easter as Creation’s Eighth Day. This vision carries a transformational message, as archetypal as the Resurrection itself; something in life changes bringing illumination, deep love, and a more heart-based way of being. Jesus, who fulfills the Law and the Prophets, appears with Moses and Elijah in glory, then as Peter bumbles his words, trying to make sense of all this, the mystery of a cloud envelops them and God’s voice speaks. The healing story that follows points out the greatness of God, and links the mountain top theophany with an incarnational, God-with-us reality where faith becomes the true measure of wholeness and peace.
This gets to the second aspect, noticing that the theophanies take place through relationship with God. Prayer is experiential, and Divine Presence holds all this together. In each case, contemplative prayer and the grounding of God’s Presence leads to action, a connection with the world at the point of need, whatever that may be. As the world grows, evolves, changes, and struggles, the Living Christ is with us, bearing all things, holding the weight of existence, sharing the burden of life as we each take our place in manifesting our divine Source.
As we prepare to enter the Lenten journey, following Jesus on the road to Jerusalem as he casts out fear with love, may we open our hearts, perceiving the unity of all creation, and lean deeper into the mystery of God. Lent is a great time to take on spiritual disciplines, to seek self-awareness, to be intentional with prayer, and to help others through service. Rather than give something up in a punitive sense, take something on in a redemptive way. Allow God to be revealed through you, but don’t try and control that process, just be open to it. And if you find yourself in the midst of a vision, just hold it lightly, for it’s like catching a cloud, a mist of theophany.
As we live with God in our midst, may we share our praise and give God the glory, both NOW, and forever. Amen.