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Spiritual Sunday
This being Transfiguration Sunday, I share a magnificent poem by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir about the moment. Today’s lectionary readings include not only the transfiguration of Christ but also of Moses, who experienced his own direct encounter with God on Mount Sinai.
Before turning to the poem, here are the two stories, with the first one probably playing a role in the framing of the second. Moses first:
Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days; on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. Moses entered the cloud, and went up on the mountain.
And now Jesus:
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.
Muir puts himself in the mind of one of the disciples, using poetry to come as close as he can to the epiphany they experience. As he has the speaker say,
So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
Muir makes a distinction between vision, by which he may mean fantasy or wish fulfillment, and actuality. “Was it a vision,” he asks. Or
did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen…
Whatever it was, it has changed the way he sees this world. Suddenly, as though a veil has been dropped, he sees what he calls “the stone clean at the heart” of the world. For instance, he penetrates the soot that covers shepherds’ hovels:
The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath
The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day.
Likewise, he looks at refuse heaps and sees no longer garbage but instead “that fine dust that made the world.”
That’s because, as Jesus taught us, “to the pure all things are pure,” and this observation extends to “the lurkers under doorways, murderers, with rags tied round their feet for silence”; “those who hide within the labyrinth of their own loneliness and greatness”; “those entangled in their own devices”; and “the silent and the garrulous liars.” By the end of the poem, this vision has extended even to Judas, who he imagines as a child, the great betrayal “quite undone and never more be done.” “All,” the speaker says, “stepped out of their dungeons and were free.”
The thought reminds me of a passage from Wordworth’s Tintern Abbey:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Muir’s poem mentions Peter’s urge to capture the moment with something permanent. “If it had lasted but another moment,” the speaker opines, “it might have held forever.” But that’s not how God enters the world. One can’t pin down the transfiguration because then it would be something that could be contained.
Instead, Muir turns to images of spring to convey God’s kingdom come to earth. The tormented wood of the cross
will cure its hurt and grow into a tree
In a green springing corner of young Eden…
The disciples got an inkling of this on that high mountain. And although they lost sight of that vision during the crucifixion, they rediscovered it with the resurrection and Pentecost. The source of all their seeing was rinsed and cleansed.
The Transfiguration
By Edwin MuirSo from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness,
But that even they, though sour and travel stained,
Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance,
And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us
Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined
As in a morning field. Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
And nowhere? Was the change in us alone,
And the enormous earth still left forlorn,
An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world
We saw that day made this unreal, for all
Was in its place. The painted animals
Assembled there in gentle congregations,
Or sought apart their leafy oratories,
Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together,
As if, also for them, the day had come.
The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath
The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps
Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;
For he had said, ‘To the pure all things are pure.’
And when we went into the town, he with us,
The lurkers under doorways, murderers,
With rags tied round their feet for silence, came
Out of themselves to us and were with us,
And those who hide within the labyrinth
Of their own loneliness and greatness came,
And those entangled in their own devices,
The silent and the garrulous liars, all
Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.
Reality or vision, this we have seen.
If it had lasted but another moment
It might have held forever! But the world
Rolled back into its place, and we are here,
And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn,
As if it had never stirred; no human voice
Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks
To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines
And blossoms for itself while time runs on.But he will come again, it’s said, though not
Unwanted and unsummoned; for all things,
Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and seas,
And all mankind from end to end of the earth
Will call him with one voice. In our own time,
Some say, or at a time when time is ripe.
Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified,
Christ the discrucified, his death undone,
His agony unmade, his cross dismantled—
Glad to be so—and the tormented wood
Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree
In a green springing corner of young Eden,
And Judas damned take his long journey backward
From darkness into light and be a child
Beside his mother’s knee, and the betrayal
Be quite undone and never more be done.
