Spiritual Sunday
As it is the last Sunday before Lent, today we hear the account of the transfiguration. Poet Mark Jarman has a poem about the moment when the veil between the material and spiritual worlds is, for a moment, removed so that Jesus and the disciples come face to face with divinity. I like the poem because it imagines Jesus as human enough to resist what the prophets of old are telling him. After all, if they are informing him of the resurrection, they would also be informing him of the crucifixion.
Jarman imagines Jesus resisting and then being transfigured by the resistance. The great spiritual breakthroughs do not come without a struggle.
First, here’s Luke’s version of the incident:
Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he 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. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”–not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
Here are the first and final sections of Jarman’s lengthy poem:
Transfiguration
By Mark Jarman
And there appeared to them Elijah and Moses and they were talking to Jesus. (Mark 9-2)
They were talking to him about resurrection, about law, about
the suffering ahead.
They were talking as if to remind him who he was and who they
were. He was not
Like his three friends watching a little way off, not like
the crowd
At the foot of the hill. A gray-green thunderhead massed
from the sea
And God spoke from it and said he was his. They were
talking
About how the body, broken or burned, could live again,
remade.
Only the fiery text of the thunderhead could explain it.
And they were talking
About pain and the need for judgement and how he would
make himself
A law of pain, both its spirit and its letter in his own flesh,
and then break it,
That is, transcend it. His clothes flared like magnesium,
as they talked.
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I want to believe that he talked back to them, his radiant
companions.
And I want to believe he said too much was being asked
and too much promised.
I want to believe that that was why he shone in the eyes
of his friends.
The witnesses looking on, because he spoke for them,
because he loved them
And was embarrassed to learn how he and they were
going to suffer.
I want to believe he resisted at that moment, when he
appear glorified.
Because he could not reconcile the contradictions and
suspected
That love had a finite span and was merely the comfort
of the lost.
I know he must have acceded to his duty, but I want
to believe
He was transfigured by resistance, as he listened, and
they talked.
Further thoughts: Because my youngest son and two youngest grandchildren were with us all day yesterday, I didn’t have time to say all I wanted about Jarman’s wonderful poem. In sections 2-6, he elaborates on what he believes is involved in the process of transfiguration, which according to Webster’s means a “change in appearance or metamorphosis” and “an exalting, glorifying, or spiritual change.” In section 2, the transfiguration is medical: Jarman talks how about his mother, suffering from severe medical and mental problems, is restored through a medical procedure. The family has brought their mother to a doctor, but Jarman frames it as though they are bringing her to Jesus. And indeed, modern medicine can seem miraculous:
When we brought our mother to him, we said, “Lord,
she falls down the stairs.
She cannot hold her water. In the afternoon she forgets
the morning.”
And he said, “All things are possible to those who believe.
Shave her head,
Insert a silicone tube inside her skull, and run it under her
scalp,
Down her neck, and over her collarbone, and lead it into her
stomach.”
And we did and saw that she no longer stumbled or wet herself.
She could remember the morning until the evening came. And
we went our way,
Rejoicing as much as we could, for we had worried many years.
In section 3, imagining that conversation that Jesus is having with Moses and Elisha that has transfigured him, Jarman speculates that they are talking about the miracle of life itself. These include “the complexities of blood and lymph,” matted hair and lice, and above all the brain/mind:
And they were talking about the lamp burning in the skull’s niche.
They eyes drinking light from within and light from without.
And how simple it is to see the future, if you look at it like the past.
And how the present belonged to the flesh and its density and
darkness
And was hard to talk about. Before and after were easier. They
talked about light.
In section four, the poet talks about another miracle, although not a medical one this time. Someone who has been blind since his wedding day is restored to a certain kind of sight–we’re not sure if it’s literal or not–when some miracle worker tells the man to begin remembering his parents. The man remembers so much that “suddenly his sight came back and blinded him, like a flashbulb.”
In section five, Moses and Elisha are talking to Jesus about law and how lawgiving should be
Like rainfall, a light rain falling all morning and mixing with dew–
A rain that passes through the spiderweb and penetrates the dirt
clod
Without melting it…
Eventually, however, the law can become cumbersome. It is at that point, the poet imagines, that Moses and Elisha tell Jesus that
you hurled judgement into the crowd and watched them
Spook like cattle, reached in and stirred the turmoil faster,
scarier.
And they were saying that; to save the best, many must
be punished,
Including the best. And no one was exempt, as they
explained it,
Not themselves, not him, or anyone he loved, anyone who
loved him.
By section 6, Moses and Elisha are getting down to brass tacks. They have confirmed Jesus’s foundational spiritual change but now are telling him that suffering is the inevitable consequence. If anyone else were in such a situation–told that the transformative feelings were real and that the voices would be with there to prepare him or her for the end–then that person too would “seem transfigured”:
Take anyone and plant a change inside them that they feel
And send them to an authority to assess that feeling.
When they are told
That for them alone there waits a suffering in accordance with
the laws
Of their condition, from which they may recover or may not,
Then they know the vortex on the mountaintop, the inside of
the unspeakable,
The speechlessness before the voices began talking to them,
Talking to prepare them, arm them and disarm them, until the
end.
And if anybody’s look, they will seem transfigured.
So returning to the concluding section (7), we now understand the whirl of emotions and thoughts going through Jesus’s head. We can imagine him replying to Moses and Elisha that “too much was being asked and too much promised”–not only of him but of his followers. The poet even imagines him struggling with the contradictions–about whether love was eternal or merely momentary, “the comfort of the lost”–so that while Jesus in the end “accede[s] to his duty,” it’s not only the promise but the struggle that changes the appearance of his face so that his clothes appear to be dazzling white.
Jarman, in other words, tries to relate to Jesus’s encounter with the numinous by putting it in terms he can relate to. Doing so, after all, is one of poetry’s basic jobs.
