In her popular novel The Secret Garden, English playwright and author Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett wrote: “If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden”. In other words, if each and every one of us adopts the appropriate perspective on our lives we can easily consider that, as Søren Kierkegaard put it: “Life is a mystery to be lived not a problem to be solved”. How come this is so?
The feast of Our Lord’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, which the universal Church celebrated on Monday 6, explains it all. The Greek word the Synoptic Gospels use for the word transfiguration is ‘metamorphosis’. The latter suggests total transformation. It is interesting that within the Christian Oriental mystical tradition the very “light of the Tabor” became tantamount with the profoundest experience of God, which utterly transforms our being after the painful climb to the mountain.
The transfiguration is the action of God’s glorious grace within us and, as such, it is never our own isolated effort. In the second letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul affirms: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3, 18).
The early Christian Alexandrian scholar and theologian Origen explained Saint Paul’s affirmation in one of his literary, spiritual and mystical exegetical works concerning the Transfiguration account.
“If therefore any one of us wishes to be taken by Jesus, and led up by Him to the high mountain, and be deemed worthy of beholding His transfiguration (‘metamorphosis’) apart, let him pass beyond the six days, because he no longer beholds the things which are seen, no longer loves the world, nor the things in the world, nor lusts after any worldly lust, which is the lust of bodies, and of the riches of the body, and of the glory which is after the flesh, and whatever things whose nature it is to distract and drag away the soul from the things which are better and more divine, and bring it down and fix it fast to the deceit of this age, in wealth and glory, and the rest of the lusts which are the foes of truth” (ch. 36). Obviously, Origen’s ‘via negattiva’, that is explaining God’s nature by saying what God is not, is here pivotal in the mystical understanding of what the Apostle of the Gentiles states in his first letter to the Corinthians: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2, 9).
But God’s most unfathomable and mysterious love for humanity is beautifully concealed within the Gospel message, which essentially demands our direct collaborative participation: believing in Jesus.
That is why Jesus says to Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3, 16). Furthermore, this is amply confirmed by the Father’s voice from the overshadowing cloud, which clearly stated: “This is my beloved Son; listen to him” (Mark 9, 7).
Salvation is to be found in listening to and abiding by Jesus’ word.
Only the latter can eventually cause that much-needed transformation we all crave for as fallen persons. As Pope Benedict XVI rightly points out in his inspiring encyclical on Christian hope, SpeSalvi: “The Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known − it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life” (§ 3).
Let us go up daily to Jesus Christ, the person in whom the land meets the sky and the earth touches the heavens, the meeting place, the place of mists, the place of voices and conversations, the place of listening, the place of salvation.
Mario Attard OFM Cap
SAN GWANN