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Spiritual Sunday
The last Sunday in Epiphany always features the Transfiguration, which is when three of the disciples witness Jesus conversing with Moses and Elijah. I’m therefore sharing some preliminary thoughts about Joh Gatta’s book The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation.
John, a friend and one-time former colleague at Sewanee, extends the idea of the Transfiguration. While it is traditionally seen as that moment when the disciples fully realized that Christ was the messiah, John sees it as something more than a signal that God has entered humanity. Rather, it can be read as God entering creation generally, non-human as well as human. Here’s the story as it appears in Mark:
Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.
As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. (Mark 9:2-9)
Believing that such a story can connect Christian vision with environmentalism, John’s book addresses the question of “how the entire cosmos stands transfigured in the light of Christ?” “How,” he asks, “might this vision of New Creation shape the earth-centered spirituality that has begun to surface lately in response to our planet’s ecological crisis?”
John complains that, too often, the only parts of the Bible that are seen as having relevance to the environmental movement are a couple of early episodes in Genesis. Those who insist that humans should have dominion over creation square off against those who believe God put us on earth as stewards of creation. The Transfiguration story, John contends, can be used to chart a more productive path forward:
The paradigm of Transfiguration encourages us to view creation as a continuously evolving transformation of matter and energy, a dynamic immediacy, rather than a one-time leap from nothingness situated in the distant path. As Teilhard de Chardin so clearly perceived, such a dynamic cosmology requires a theology for our post-Darwinian era that is responsible to the spirit of evolutionary science. Transfiguration also highlights Christ’s role in the New Creation, thereby leading us to identify the process of creation not simply with a time of origins, but with God’s ideal and future fulfillment of redemption. So Transfiguration carries the promise of extending our horizon of faith–beyond belief in the world’s original goodness, toward a vision of eschatological hope [where we are headed].
Because I am currently with our grandchildren in Georgia and forgot to bring John’s book with me (I’m relying on what shows up in Google Books here), I can’t yet report on the late chapters, where John shows how the arts (including literature) articulate visions of a transformed and transfigured nature. Nor do I recall what literature he has chosen. While I look forward to sharing more from his book in future posts, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t cite the following Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet. The poem, which seems to evoke the spirit that the disciples witnessed on the mount, also strives to imagine a nature that resists the attempts of industrial capitalism to subdue it:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Central to John’s book is this notion that nature, despite how we abuse it, is “never spent” and that there continues to live “the dearest freshness deep down things.” Stay tuned for more on this.
Reader comment from Pastor Sue Schmidt: In this coming reading, the SALT commentary, a wonderful blog resource, mentions that Jesus was in the wilderness with the wild animals, and that Mark ends his gospel by having Jesus tell his disciples to preach the good news to all creation. Mark 16:15. This is a nice parallel to your thoughts today.
I also am pondering my earth day sermon – a first. How we as Christians often forget the first commandment, which was to take care of creation. And now, because of “the fall,” all creation is groaning as it waits for the “sons of God to be revealed.” (Romans 8: 19-21.) Reclaiming our love of and care for the earth is a sign that God is truly coming to life and light within us.
And my response: I’m just becoming aware of Paul’s notion of “the cosmic Christ,” Sue, which makes so much sense. I love the way that Barbara Kingsolver handles the religious dimension in Flight Behavior in an internal debate that the family is having over logging. Discussing it over with their pastor, the mother says, “That land was bestowed on on for a purpose. And I don’t think it was to end up looking like a pile of trash.” And a little later, after the father calls the pastor “a tree hugger,” the pastor, who “looked amused,” responds, “Well now, what are you, Burley, a tree puncher? What have you got against the Lord’s trees?” And that carries the day.