Have You Been Transfigured?

Throughout our lives we face joys and sorrows, moments of great enlightenment and times of deep darkness, the toss and swell of waves in the sea of life.  Although we long to taste the pleasures without the pains, these opposites reflect and complement one another, working together into a pattern that one day we shall know in its fullness.

At times we may feel such elation in the face of some joyful experience that we feel we shall never taste sorrow again.  Love in particular may produce such fruit.

Then death or pain comes and we wonder how we shall ever taste joy again.

Yet ever we step forward, day by day, toward our resurrection, from joy to sorrow and then to joy again.  We are able to continue forward because of our transfiguration experiences.

The apostles standing at the Transfiguration saw Christ revealed in His glory with Moses and Elijah beside Him, talking with Him of the Crucifixion, the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.  For in that Transfiguration the apostles were given an experience of the glory shrouded in the Crucifixion that they might not despair when the time came.  Yet they wanted only to build tents there that the experience might never end.

It is ever so.  We wish to cling to those moments of transfiguration.  We do not understand—or do not wish to believe—that they are lights given us to carry us through our own crucifixions to the Resurrection.