The Feast of the Transfiguration, 6th August 2018
In the story of the Transfiguration we are told that Jesus goes up a mountain to pray, taking Peter, John and James with him. On the mountain his face is changed, and his clothes become dazzling white. Moses and Elijah are seen talking to Jesus and the voice of God declares: ‘This is my Son, my chosen; listen to him’. (cf. Luke 9:28-36)
In the story of the Transfiguration we are told that Jesus goes up a mountain to pray, taking Peter, John and James with him. On the mountain his face is changed, and his clothes become dazzling white. Moses and Elijah are seen talking to Jesus and the voice of God declares: ‘This is my Son, my chosen; listen to him’. (cf. Luke 9:28-36)
As Christians
we live our lives meditating on the story of Jesus; one way to enter that story
is to seek to see his face. Jesus’ face, unknown as it is to us, is also deeply
familiar. The subject of icons, iconography and religious paintings. We know Jesus,
for instance, as the baby in his mother’s arms, as the child teaching in the
temple, as a man being baptised, facing temptation in the desert, as the
servant washing his disciples’ feet, blessing bread, in Gethsemane, on the Cross,
greeting Mary Magdalene as the Risen Christ and ascending into Glory.
Devotion to the face of Jesus as a spiritual discipline developed from the
story of Veronika. The story goes that Veronika met Jesus as he was walking the way of the Cross
and she offered him her veil to wipe his brow. He took the veil and wiped his
face, and it is believed that an image of Jesus was left on the veil. The veil
is kept at St Peter’s, Rome (see above). (This story is not in the Bible but forms part of Christian tradition).
One modern
saint particularly formed by devotion to the Holy Face was Thérèse of Lisieux. Thérèse was the last of 9 children (4 died at a young age) born into
a very devout Roman Catholic family in France. Her mother died when she was
just 4 years old and at the age of 10 she had a spiritual experience whilst
praying before a statue of Mary, the Mother of God. It is thought that Thérèse was
experiencing some sort of mental breakdown, as her second Mother, her older
sister Pauline had just entered the convent, leaving her and awakening the
memories and trauma of her mother’s death. It was during this illness that she was
healed by the following encounter:
All
of a sudden the blessed Virgin appeared beautiful to me, so beautiful that never
had I seen anything so attractive; her face was suffused with an ineffable
benevolence and tenderness, but what penetrated to the very depths of my soul
was the ‘ravishing smile of the blessed Virgin’. At that instant all my pain
disappeared and two large tears glistened on my eyelashes and flowed down my
cheeks silently, but they were tears of unmixed joy. Ah! I thought, the blessed
Virgin smiled at me, how happy I am, but never will I tell anyone for my
happiness would then disappear….. It was her countenance alone that struck me. (‘Love
as Vocation’ pg. 227)
Thérèse’s
compassionate encounter with Mary was, like Jesus’ transfiguration itself,
framed by difficulties and pain. Jesus goes up the mountain, in Luke’s account,
just after he has been telling his disciples
that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering. The transfiguration is a
relatively short episode in his adult ministry of teaching and healing; it
gives us a tantalising glimpse of glory. It is a glory that can often be
perceived on the faces of those who are very near death when the air is thin
and the Holy Spirit is tangible.
Having just entered
the Carmelite convent (age 15) Thérèse was confronted by new pain and
loss; her father became very ill:
The face of the person she loved
most on earth was now forever deprived of sanity and transformed into the
frightful mask of living death… With the obsessiveness of grief she pondered on
the meaning of the trial which had befallen so faithful a servant of God. (quoted
in, ‘Love as Vocation’ pg. 226)
Devotion to
the Holy Face of the suffering Jesus was the way in which Thérèse spiritually
journeyed through her personal tragedies and loss. She did not have (despite
her encounter with Mary retold above) much consolation in her spiritual life. At
the end of her own very short life (she died of TB at 24 yrs) she said to her sister,
Pauline:
‘The words in Isaiah: ‘No stateliness here, no majesty, no beauty,
as we gaze upon him, to win our hearts. Nay, here is one despised, left out of
all human reckoning; bowed with misery, and no stranger to weakness’; how
should we recognise that face? How should we take any account of him, a man so
despised?’’ – these words were the basis of my whole worship of the Holy Face ….
I, too, wanted to be without comeliness and beauty, alone to tread the grapes,
unknown to all creatures.’ (‘Love as Vocation’ pg. 226)
Thérèse’s own transfiguration, which it
can be argued occurred during her earthly life, was born of this desire to be
hidden and disregarded for Christ and yet at the same time to ‘win souls for
Christ’ through the most perfect way, the way of love. And it was the practice of smiling that was the spiritual
discipline that transfigured her- which made her a living presence of divine love:
‘Smilingly, Thérèse went
through her years in the convent, graciously, guilelessly, sunnily smiling. But
that smile was the most stringent instrument of her physical and spiritual penance.’
She took literally the Sermon on the Mount’s instructions not to let a
discipline that involves suffering be revealed in the face (Matt 6.16-18). So
little and larger self-denials and sacrifices for the sake of others, and minor
and sometimes major physical sufferings were concealed by her smile……Forty
years after her death the surviving nuns from the convent always spoke of her
beautiful, radiant smile. (‘Love as Vocation’ pg. 231)
Thérèse’s
short life was framed by death and suffering- even in the convent, many Sisters
died during an outbreak of influenza, leading her to remark in her autobiography:
‘Death seemed everywhere in the ascendant…. On the evening when our
sub-Prioress died, I was alone in the infirmary; nobody can imagine the state
to which the community was reduced, except those of us who kept our feet
through it all, and yet, desolate as we were, I felt that God was watching over
us all the time’. (The Story of a Soul,
pg. 167).
The practice
of meditating on the suffering face of Christ, which to us may seem excessively
morbid today, was for Thérèse, a way of connecting with the overflowing bounty of
God’s love. The love that Christ shows us on the Cross connected with her own
sense of vocation to love for Christ, and to offer him her little flowers and
petals of sacrifice, by loving always and everyone, persisting with this practice through personal rejection,
mockery, pain and hiddenness.
In Thérèse’s
own words, here is her understanding of her life’s work:
‘At recreation, and at all
time when freedom is granted us, I ought to single out the sisters who are least
attractive to me, roadside casualties who need a good Samaritan. Often just a
word or a friendly smile are enough to make these difficult natures open out …it
won’t be long before I meet with discouragement; some remark of mine, quite
innocently meant, will be taken up all wrong. But it isn’t a waste of time, because
my object in being kind to everybody, especially to the less attractive ones,
is to rejoice the heart of the Lord.’ (The
Story of a Soul, pg. 233).
In church we
gather together each week to draw strength from the story of Jesus. In seeking
his face, we are thrown together to look at each other’s faces. We may not like
what we see and that is the point! Many people avoid churches, saying that they
don’t need church to be a Christian. But, we do need community to be Christians
– it’s very easy to be a saint alone with ourselves, but it is encountering
others that we realise the inadequacy of our own love. Churches like all other communities
are always places of discontent,
conflict, petty hatreds and grumbling, for we are a gathering of sinners. But
we come to gaze on God in Jesus, to raise our thoughts heavenward, to be
inspired to be greater than we are. The story of Jesus’ transfiguration encourages
us to persevere on that journey. What we are challenged with is the task to
love one another. If we manage this in some small way, we will be an extraordinary church. For it is only in this small and hidden way, of
devotion to each other, that we will begin to experience the sort of
transfiguration that, despite our constant failure, remains our destiny in
Christ.
Further Reading
Autobiography
of a Saint, Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul, translated
by Ronald Knox, Fontana, 1958
‘Love
as Vocation, Thérèse of Lisieux’ pgs. 216-240 in Self
and Salvation, Being Transformed David Ford, CUP 1999
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