22. Transfiguration

Our lives are changed, transfigured by the Gospel. Since the time of Francis of Assisi, up to that of Marthe Robin or Padre Pio, saints in the west have sometimes received the stigmata. Saints of Eastern Europe on the other hand, are transfigured saints. In the course of a conversation, while they are in prayer, suddenly they are enveloped in a sort of luminous cloud, causing them to shine in an extraordinary manner. Their bodies begin to radiate the depth of their spiritual life. Their material bodies are no longer prisoners of the soul or the spirit, on the contrary, the body is seized upon by the mystery of their deepest being: their relationship with the living God.

Stigmatists on one side, transfigured saints on the other, here we find two different- and apparently opposite ways - of living the Christian mystery, two ways that are complementary however, and which today are not opposed, and not just because Europe is beginning to be one political reality, but because the two lungs of the one Church, the two wings of the same dove, find themselves reunited in the one body.

If for the west, Christmas and Easter are the most important feasts, for the east, the Epiphany and the Transfiguration are the most solemnly celebrated. But today in the west as in the east, the same icons are venerated.

How are we to understand Jesus' Transfiguration? Did His prayer to the Father on the threshold of His imminent death, provoke an excess of life, of consciousness, of light? A kind of supertension like what happens to an electric bulb before it cracks? The offering of the Son at the heart of a prayer anticipating the Resurrection, is the authentic victory of humanity over every kind of temptation, the incandescent revelation of man according to God.

Peter as his successors after him, would like to have fixed that moment. He is always tempted to feast his eyes on images of triumphant glory. He likes to acknowledge Jesus by His glorious titles: "You are the Christ the Son of the living God." But he must also come down from that mountain bathed in light and plunge himself into the thick of what those words signify in social and even in daily living. For the truth of his Lord and His greatest glory is that of gift, even to abandon. It is a Lord who kneels at his feet, who gives himself into the hands of repentant women sinners, but also into those of stupid sinners. He disregards titles of authority, to the point as we saw already of allowing himself to be submitted to questioning, ill-treated in his body, and disfigured in His identity.

Since He is the Way, let us follow Him in order to die to ourselves, and to live by the One who died and rose for us: the Easter road, losing oneself to find oneself, discarding one's mask in order to discover one's identity, alone or as a people, or nation or Church, as an Order, a confession or a community. Away with narrow nationalisms, identical references or conservative hang-ups so as to enter the life that is gift and forgiveness, and where the gift is nothing less that self giving.

We're not talking here of some Hegelian mechanism, nor of a passage through a "speculative Good Friday", as abstract as it is automatic: this three-pointed dialectical machine does not work. No, it means as a person, as subject, entering through Jesus Christ, into the Father's confidence, living and breathing Trinitarian life which is consummate relation.

The transfigured Christ shows us the man in his full truth, divinised man, transparent to his truth. Not a Prometheus freed from his chains, but a Son, who assumes his limitations and ratifies the filial relationship which constitutes His essence. He does not steal the fire from jealous gods to guard it for himself, but shares it and scatters it with divine generosity.