Spiritual Sunday
Today’s church readings are about, as Paul puts it in his First Letter to the Corinthians, seeing God face to face rather than “through a glass darkly.” We hear first about how Moses, after receiving the Ten Commandments, returned to the Israelites with his face so lit up that he had to wear a veil:
As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him.
In the Gospel reading the disciples see Jesus transfigured by the Holy Spirit and flanked by Moses and Elijah:
And while he [Peter] was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.
It each case, the divine seeps through cracks in a reality we thought we knew and people come away with an enduring experience. As Malcolm Guite puts it as Jesus’s transfiguration,
The Love that dances at the heart of things
Shone out upon us from a human face
And to that light the light in us leaped up…
Guite’s sonnet acknowledges that we live under a “blackened sky” and carry the “darkened scar” of “long-extinguished hope.” Yet suddenly the veil drops, the darkling glass shatters, and our hardened skin becomes tender”:
For that one moment, “in and out of time,”
On that one mountain where all moments meet,
The daily veil that covers the sublime
In darkling glass fell dazzled at his feet.
There were no angels full of eyes and wings
Just living glory full of truth and grace.
The Love that dances at the heart of things
Shone out upon us from a human face
And to that light the light in us leaped up,
We felt it quicken somewhere deep within,
A sudden blaze of long-extinguished hope
Trembled and tingled through the tender skin.
Nor can this this blackened sky, this darkened scar
Eclipse that glimpse of how things really are.
In last week’s Sunday post, I mentioned how such poems can function as a kind of theology, providing us with a glimpse into how God moves in the world. Guite provides us with a “glimpse of how things really are.”
Poems don’t have to specifically reference God when they describe transfiguring moments. Or put another way, poetry shows us that God doesn’t have to be called God when He/She/It enters our lives.
Take, for example, Ezra Pound’s famous couplet that English teachers use to exemplify imagism. It’s a moment that occurs “In a Metro Station” when multiple faces, each glistening in the darkness, jump out at the poet. I could say, borrowing from Wordsworth, that the faces are “appareled in celestial light,” but Pound has his own incomparable way of putting it:
The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Poetry comes as close as language ever does to capturing encounters with the numinous, which is why I reject (as I said last week) analytic theology’s avoidance of metaphor and allusive language. Transcendent meaning glistens on a wet black bough or in faces that we encounter by chance.
I remember being struck in high school by how Pound wrote two pages of notes commenting on his poem, which in some ways is a version of Peter wanting to build three shrines to capture what he has just witnessed. Both are efforts to bring the divine within our earthly understanding. The glimpse itself, however, is “in and out of time.”
